why is this bad? there's a lot of personal / confidential info they deal with. and when they work in office, there are strict rules like no phones, no pen/pencil, etc at the work area.
exactly this is my point, too.
People still played on their smart phones and vaped weed in the office.
Technology and rules to maintain security, all are nearly worthless when wages and morale aren’t priorities.
Let's just go with the assumption your comment is sarcasm.
the customer care employee who is WFH and has access to your bank / income / health records can click your details on their phone and share with cops / telemarketing companies / criminals that will come after you .
you okay with that ?
Besides that, as others already stated, there are a lot of jobs that have a lot more access and they are not subject of those invasions.
This invasion with camera's and microphones etc to monitor the employee and it's surrounding is simply not ok. And specially not when it's about their HOME. No matter how you try to defend it.
Some competent Apple engineers could have created some privacy/security focused systems. And for the cases where this engineers can't create such a system have this type of operation forwarded to a different support person in a higher level.