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If they wanted to protect privacy, they would only have two responses:

"We confirm that this person worked for Apple, ending on [date]. By policy, we don't discuss any further details."

"We do not have records that this person worked for Apple."

That is essentially what wiping title record with "associate" does. It's a generic term that is commonly synonymous with employee.

No it's clearly not.

It's very clearly implying they had a job with the title "associate".

Exactly. No information is better than inaccurate information.

No it doesn't. It clearly could mean that, but it literally just means the person has associated with the company. I don't know why they'd use language that could create that confusion, but it's not straightforward dishonesty.

It could mean that, but not clearly, and it really doesn't mean that.

Setting aside whether it is a good practice or not, if all of these agencies know that Apple does this, then it becomes a de facto meangingless term.

If this has been an ongoing practice for a while and an agency is not aware of it, then it is a bad agency to work with.

So your answer is "It's ok to be misleading. And because you don't know you're being mislead it's your fault"?

Yeah I have a very different opinion of that situation.

They literally pre-empted this response at the beginning of the comment

> It's a generic term that is commonly synonymous with employee.

It is not. It implies an entry level/unskilled/probationary position.

You would call a person who works tier 1 support an associate, or works the cash register in an Apple store, or a person whose job title reads "Software Engineer" and had been with the company for 2 months. You would not call a person whose job title reads "Software Engineer" and had been with the company for 18 months an associate.

If you've got a stack of applicants and one of them comes up with some bullshit like their previous employer claims their job title was Associate and they claim their actual job title was Software Engineer, that means I either have to do legwork to figure out what's actually happening, is this person lying about their experience etc, or just hire someone else. It's not a disqualifying characteristic, but if the resume says one thing and the background check says a different thing, that's a red flag. Sometimes the red flag is nothing, basically all of us have had a scumbag for an employer at various points in our careers, who's might to lie about us to future employers just because they're spiteful. But red flags have to be chased down and verified before you can hire someone with red flags on their resume.

Right now, in 2022, I would just hire them if they had a pulse, red flags or not. But when the next recession happens? And we've gone through three rounds of layoffs, and only now are positions opening up in onesies and twosies and there are 40 applicants? I'm just going to discard the 30 resumes with red flags. Among the 10 remaining resumes I'm gonna interview the 5 who went to the best schools and had the most experience.

Since it will be widely known among peer organizations that Apple has this policy, the presence or absence of the "Associate" title achieves this, in effect, does it not? I think it's unlikely someone seeking a 600K job will be mistaken for having been a retail employee.

Based on the article it obviously isn’t widely enough known to prevent people from losing job offers over it.

And in that scenario, Apple is the bad actor for referring to a non-C-suite employee as an associate, not the employer who fired someone over unverified information and poor assumptions?

They weren’t fired, they had an offer revoked.

But either way, two things can be bad at the same time

I'd argue that false data doesn't achieve this, it just confuses everything. Using an analogy in programming terms, it would be like `job_title <- Maybe "NULL"` whereas they really ment `job_title <- Nothing`.

I do agree with this. If they stick with this policy it would be better if they use some unambiguous title like “Former Employee”.

This was the policy during the time I worked at Goldman Sachs in fact. They wouldn't confirm any details other than your employment dates.

> "Employee" is a term fraught with legal and other liability in it's use (think Uber drivers - are they employees or contractors?). HR departments will refer to everybody as “associates” to mitigate risk. If Apple wanted to confirm employment, but not divulge titles, they could say associate.

But yet if you call these services while the person is still employed, they absolutely will divulge titles.

There's no risk mitigation happening. It's just "you're no longer one of us, we don't give a shit".

>But yet if you call these services while the person is still employed, they absolutely will divulge titles.

Is that actually the case?

The company involved stated that if the person was currently employed, they would give the job title (and that while their service would report 'Associate' post employment, if someone cared enough to clarify, they would be able to call them, give identifying information, and they would be able to get job titles from historic data).

So this isn't a case of Apple fucking past employees over. It's just a case of them not wanting to give the titles to Experian. What a lot of hullabaloo over nothing.

Or anybody. So any ex-employee could potentially fail a background check / employment verification check (as at least one person here has). Because Apple, previously happy to say "Yes, this person works here as a Senior Product Manager" now says "Eh, sure. They were associated with the company."

They're not obligated to, you're right. But it's not exactly endearing of a company that has any gratitude whatsoever to its employees. But then again, from a company that was more than happy to engage in multiple illegal acts to collude to avoid poaching, to collude to keep salaries artificially deflated, I'm not entirely surprised.

Protecting privacy would be not giving names out at all- instead they do confirm employment, but lie about what the role was.

Or that by demoting people that Apple is lying and could be sued for tortious interference.

There are reasons for privacy, which include discrimination based on that information. Discrimination based on incorrect information is just as harmful.

That said "associate" is arguably vague.