Filevault: "A recovery key has been set by your company, school, or institution."

A solution!

First, please remember that I have no real computer knowledge, so caveat emptor; please backup, backup, and backup before trying stuff!

1. Disable/remove FileVault protection on your hard drive.
2. Go into /Library/Keychains (not user's ~/Library/Keychains, and not /System/Library/Keychains)
3. Trash the files FileVaultMaster.cer and FileVaultMaster.keychain
4. Restart the computer and log in
5. Enable FileVault

Voila- this gave me a real recovery key (not institutional); hurrah!!!

Does anyone know how to escalate to an Apple Engineer? Basically, I bought a brand new M1 and am now stuck, after almost 40 hours of troubleshooting that didn't work, with a brand new MBP where one has to log into one account, then switch to the main account, to get any work done :( :( :(

Can I somehow get normal behaviour where FileVault is enabled but I can log directly into my main user account?

If it helps, here are the results of today's efforts. Apologies if some of this seems nonsensical, but I'm not a computer guy, just someone who uses a computer to get non-computer work done, so tried all sorts of stuff I found online.

Presumably the new computer was "polluted" by the old computer during the migration. The old computer was bought straight from Apple by mail. So the only 3 possibilities I can think of for an enabled institutional key are:

1) Nefarious actor in Apple supply chain who did this at the factory.

2) Nefarious actor who broke into a hotel room while I was out of the room on a business trip and figured how to install an institutional recovery key (unlikely since I am a very low value target!)

3) Bug where during a system crash or whatever at some point in the 6 years I had the old computer something "glitched" and set an institutional recovery key by some random pathway.

I was very excited by finding this command in fdesetup. It seemed to work. But when I turned FileVault back on the same problem reoccurred:

NewMBPM1:~ Long-T01_UID$ sudo fdesetup hasinstitutionalrecoverykey

true

NewMBPM1:~ Long-T01_UID$ sudo fdesetup removerecovery -institutional

Password:

Enter the user name:S01_UID

Enter the password for user 'S01_UID':

NewMBPM1:~ Long-T01_UID$ sudo fdesetup hasinstitutionalrecoverykey

false

Any and all ideas most welcome!!!

***

Thanks for weighing in!

"Was the old Mac controlled by your company, school or institution?": Nope. I bought it directly from Apple online.

"Where did you purchase the new Mac? Was it a demo Mac?" Again, a pristine purchase directly from Apple online.

Thanks for weighing in!

Yep, transfer pollution sure seems to be the case.

Sorry for my ignorance, but I'm not sure what "was that computer every associated with an MDM Service" means.

Again, not a crucial problem to solve, but I'm just very intellectually curious as to why this has happened?!?