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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.

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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”.

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