{"id":33495,"date":"2021-08-31T16:03:28","date_gmt":"2021-08-31T20:03:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=33495"},"modified":"2024-12-02T15:44:44","modified_gmt":"2024-12-02T20:44:44","slug":"privacy-for-apple-employees","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2021\/08\/31\/privacy-for-apple-employees\/","title":{"rendered":"Privacy for Apple Employees"},"content":{"rendered":"

Zoë Schiffer<\/a> (tweet<\/a>, Hacker News<\/a>):<\/p>\n

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Jacob Preston was sitting down with his manager during his first week at Apple when he was told, with little fanfare, that he needed to link his personal Apple ID and work account.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

Three years later, when Preston handed in his resignation, the choice came back to haunt him. His manager told him to return his work laptop, and — per Apple protocol — said he shouldn’t wipe the computer’s hard drive. His initial worry had come to pass: his personal messages were on this work laptop, as were private documents concerning his taxes and a recent home loan.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

Employees have been asked to install software builds on their phones to test out new features prior to launch — only to find the builds expose their personal messages. Others have found that when testing new products like Apple’s Face ID, images are recorded every time they open their phones. “If they did this to a customer, people would lose their goddamn minds,” says Ashley Gjøvik, a senior engineering program manager.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

Dogfooding leads to better products, but Apple’s systems aren’t designed to do this in a privacy preserving way. Apple work e-mail addresses can’t be used to sign up for iCloud or AppleConnect, so employees are required to use personal<\/a> accounts<\/a>. iOS and macOS only let you sign into one Apple ID at a time, so it’s not practical to have separate “personal” accounts for work and personal. Having separate devices for work and personal is also discouraged because it gets in the way of “live-on” dogfooding.<\/p>\n\n

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The blurring of personal and work accounts has resulted in some unusual situations, including Gjøvik allegedly being forced to hand compromising photos of herself to Apple lawyers when her team became involved in an unrelated legal dispute.<\/p>\n

Underpinning all of this is a stringent employment agreement that gives Apple the right to conduct extensive employee surveillance, including “physical, video, or electronic surveillance” as well as the ability to “search your workspace such as file cabinets, desks, and offices (even if locked), review phone records, or search any non-Apple property (such as backpacks, purses) on company premises.”<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

It might seem like a company obsessed with secrecy would be sympathetic to its employees’ wishes to have confidential information of their own. But at Apple, secrecy requires the opposite: extensive knowledge, and control, over its workforce.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

It’s not clear to what extent the policies are standard corporate ones that elevate the company’s interests over the employee’s—because they can—or whether they date to Tim Cook’s 2012 doubling down on secrecy<\/a>, or before. But however much Apple cares about privacy for customers, that doesn’t seem to extend to employees. Developers, too, are encouraged to attach privacy invading sysdiagnose logs to each bug report, where they live in Radar “forever.”<\/p>\n\n

The legal dispute that led to turning over Gjøvik’s private<\/a> data<\/a> did not even involve her personally, though she is separately fighting the company over discrimination and harassment<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n

Casey Newton<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Wrote about the twin challenges hitting Apple simultaneously: regulators and lawmakers forcing it to release its grip on the App Store, and employees organizing effectively demanding internal change.<\/p>\n

Apple has never seen anything like it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

Zoe Schiffer<\/a> (tweet<\/a>, Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai<\/a>, Hacker<\/a> News<\/a>):<\/p>\n

Apple employee organizing took another step this morning with the launch of a website called AppleToo<\/a>. The goal is to collect stories from workers at all levels of the organization who’ve experienced harassment or discrimination.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

Previously:<\/p>\n