Is it possible to disable Personal Hotspot on iPhones with a configuration profile?

Question

The company I work for is having an issue with users racking up huge data bills with iOS hotspot tethering. Is there a way we can push a profile that will disable this feature? I have looked through the iPhone Configuration Utility and cannot find any settings for this feature.

Answer 1

As of iOS 9.2, there is no way to disable the Personal Hotspot feature through Configuration Profiles.

The best you can do at the moment is to use an MDM server to report on the status of the Personal Hotspot feature and manually instruct users to switch it off, or arrange to disable it through your carrier.

Answer 2

Yes,you can.I just spoke with AT&T and they walk me through a process.I have IPHONE 6. You go to Settings#General#Restrictions,select ON#Data# select "Don't alow changes"

Answer 3

This is not quite what the OP is looking for because their question is coming from a business context, but for those who may be interested in this question for parental control related reasons: I think when Qustudio is set up using a VPN as instructed in the link below a side effect is that tethering is effectively disabled (you can still start tethering and connect devices but those connected devices will not have any internet access via the tethering).

https://www.qustodio.com/pt/help/article/2076783/ (Note: I think the use of a Supervised phone setup in the link may not be necessary, probably any way of setting Qustudio up on ios would work. Though this is probably the most robust setup)

Answer 4

If you can't find an option in iPCU, it seems that there probably isn't a way to disable the Personal Hotspot feature. Is there any way that you could cancel the tethering option with your carrier? (If you are unaware, carriers provide tethering as an option that can be disabled/enabled at carrier level at free will.)

Answer 5

This is now possible (sort of). As of Apple Configurator 2.9 there is a new relevant configuration option (only for supervised devices).

If you open a recent version of Apple Configurator 2, create a new profile, go to the Restrictions section (click "Configure") and scroll down you will find "Allow modifying Personal Hotspot settings (supervised only)".

The problem is that, as highlighted in this article, you can't outright turn off Personal Hotspot in iOS 13.1 and later. So you can lock "Allow Others to Join" as off, but it's not that simple to prevent all possible Hotspot usage. The article says "When [Allow Others To Join] is off, only iCloud-connected devices can connect and approved Family Sharing group members may use it, if any.". So this means that in order to completely disable the usage of Personal Hotspot it would be necessary (as far as I'm aware) to ensure that:

• the Apple ID of the iPhone is not under the control of the iPhone user
• the Apple ID is not part of an approved Family Sharing group of the iPhone user
• that changing account settings is disabled on the iPhone
• the iPhone is supervised and the "Allow modifying Personal Hotpot settings" policy has been properly set to disallowed.

Then the iPhone user should not be able to use Personal Hotspot.

This should work, but I have not tested it out and it may not work in future if iOS changes in ways that cause flaws in this approach. Note that the Apple ID of the iPhone can be different from the iTunes & App Store account, so I can see this working in a situation such as parental controls and if absolutely necessary perhaps in business too like the OP's original question (from 6 years ago).

Answer 6

usually you are able to produce/edit/setup/maintain/distribute profiles with the Profile Manager as part of Mac OS X Server