Apple: Whistleblower about Working Conditions | Hacker News Reader

Apple: Whistleblower about Working Conditions

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54 pointsdalf28 comments

We've seen this case before:

* Apple employee files complaint that her building is on a former Superfund site. Apparently that somehow led to a lot of conflict for her personally at the company.

* Also claims harassment by co-workers.

* And claimed sexism by her manager when he coached her voice mannerisms after a presentation.

* Signs up for Apple's "Livability" program, where you use in-development Apple devices and software, giving explicit consent that all your data will be used by Apple. Goes on to use her Apple-issued and Apple-managed device to take personal photos, which she is shocked are used as part of Apple's training/QA pipelines.

* Then takes it upon herself to reveal internal Apple secrets, including names, details, and screenshots of internal tools to the public.

* And complains that Apple is coming after her for revealing that information.

Excellent!

You’re also forgetting her saga about environmental poisoning with her apartment. It seems to me she could have Munchausen's syndrome, and certainly applies it to many things beyond health. Her Apple stuff loses very important context to the non-internal Apple world. It seems she very much sees herself as a victim and actively encourages that viewpoint on Twitter.

> * Then takes it upon herself to reveal internal Apple secrets, including names, details, and screenshots of internal tools to the public.

So you're saying Apple the company was not spying on its own employees? Was Apple the company not mass-collecting its own employees' biometric data?

Let's stick with the presented facts, which might be true or false, let's leave the character assassination thing to people who are actually paid to do that.

Monitoring company devices is not spying on employees. It’s legal and every company does this.

If my company gives me a phone, it’s weird that they don’t take every piece of data and monetize it.

It’s spying if they harvest data from my private devices or my home. It’s not spying if they have cameras in the workplace where there is no expectation of privacy.

If I want privacy, I need to be an independent contractor and use my own equipment.

Otherwise it’s just petulant complaining about things that are willingly entered into. If I don’t want biometric data captured, I shouldn’t take a job that does that.

Only some monitoring is legal and it needs to be linked to relevant explanations.

https://techcrunch.com/2023/01/30/labor-officials-found-that... specifically talks about the claims being about employees being coerced into joining such programs and into not using a separate private device.

> If I want privacy, I need to be an independent contractor and use my own equipment.

We're not in a cyberpunk megacorp dystopia (yet). You still have rights and can expect privacy in specific situations, even if you're employed by a big-corp. Check your actual rights, don't just defend what companies are doing - they don't pay you - they have their own lawyers for that.

We’ve been in a cyberpunk not-dystopia for decades. There is a lot of case law that there’s no expectation of privacy in the workplace. [0]

Employers can do stuff that is illegal for private citizens.

For example, employers can key log everything you do on your work equipment. Without your consent. They can video everything you do at work, without consent. They can keep the fingerprint you use to log in and keep the eye scan and biometric data for many purposes.

Note, I’m not defending this. Just stating facts. As they are useful facts and if I expect my employer to not do this then I need to confirm they have some practice in place to prevent it of their own volition because US law doesn’t prevent it.

I learned a lot about this when working on my org’s ssl MITM policy so it would not MITM for personal sites. While legally they could proxy and log bank logins and such, it is internal policy not to do this and to communicate to employees. Now employees can’t commit fraud with it or facilitate crimes (eg sell passwords) but they could do lame stuff like sell employee profile data (eg, prepend banks with XBank).

I only do work on work equipment. I keep a personal phone and personal laptop for any personal business.

If I didn’t want to be monitored in this way, I’d have to seek out a rare company and I’m not even sure to how to audit to make sure they actually adhere to their stated policies.

Note, this is only for employees on employer owned equipment. So I think it’s perfectly normal for Apple to log biometric data on test devices and use it for training. And to use all images on those devices for training purposes.

[0] https://www.justia.com/employment/hiring-employment-contract...

> There is a lot of case law that there’s no expectation of privacy in the workplace. [0]

The link disagrees with you. You have less privacy at a workplace, but you still have rights. For example:

> They can video everything you do at work, without consent.

no, that's just not true and the article lists exceptions. Don't kill the nuance yet.

On the other hand:

* The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) found merit to her complaints that high-level executives at Apple violated national labor law [1].

* Apple's HQ is built on an old superfund site, which requires regular testing for VOCs, etc [2].

* FOIA records show VOCs venting into HVAC at the "825 Stewart" site where she worked [3].

But yeah? Maybe she's just making it all up?

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2023/01/30/labor-officials-found-that...

[2] https://cumulis.epa.gov/supercpad/cursites/csitinfo.cfm?id=0...

[3] https://mobile.twitter.com/ashleygjovik/status/1541536458254...

#3 doesn’t seem like that big of a deal. There are no epa actions and it seems like a routine inspection to make sure controls are in place and proceeding to plan. Presenting it as something bad or substantiating her claim that work area is unsafe is stupid or duplicitous.

#1 is unrelated to her claim. Just because a company with tens of thousands of workers does something bad doesn’t mean all claims are valid.

#2 is not unusual so not remarkable unless those inspections show something dangerous. I think this is more a misunderstanding of how superfund sites are frequently remediated and used.

All this seems like a shrug and reminds me of 10 hour YouTube videos where someone is hysterically ranting because someone neglected to say “bless you” once and the video hypothesizes a lot of imaginary backstory while showing clips of unrelated explosions (not saying “bless you” is rude, Nazis are bad, here’s a video of goosestepping Nazis).

> #1 is unrelated to her claim.

What do you mean by this? The article mentions 3 things NRLB talks about. All were related to her claims, first two were confirmed, the last one is pending. The last two are related to the OP's list.

> There are no epa actions

Do you mean something very specific here? You may be referring to something I'm not familiar with as "EPA actions" but this is just a write-up of a site visit and it explicitly lists some things that need to be fixed or stop sucking bad things back into the building. These are just notes I would expect to be followed up with an actual report/summary, and wouldn't include any analysis of what the findings actually mean.

Sounds like when I worked for a large defence contractor. Except they didn’t have the competence to pull it off as well.

I got to the end of this Twitter thread and basically shrugged. If you don’t like corporate policy, leave, then make reasonable comments outside of any NDA you have signed. Trying to do anything internally unless you have a senior management position is always futile. And don’t come across as a dick, which the person does here.

> Trying to do anything internally unless you have a senior management position is always futile

There is another option, organize. Stay and fight for better conditions. Workers have always had the ability to enact change, when intentionally work together. It's more difficult but the potential gains are greater. This is how we got the 40 hour work week.

"Divided we beg, united we bargain"

I'll play Devils' advocate. Has this person not seen, and agreed to, rules for using pre-release devices or even agreements for released devices? Apple became surveillance company under Cook and this should be perfectly clear to Apple employees.

To quote South Park's "HumancentiPad" episode:

> Hold up. Here it is right here: "by clicking Agree, you are also acknowledging that Apple may sew your mouth to the butthole of another iTunes user" (...) "Apple and its subsidiaries may also, if necessary, sew yet another person's mouth onto your butthole, making you a being that shares one gastral tract." Hmmm, I'm gonna click onnn... "Decline."

It took me a moment to realize that the thread starts with a quote that makes is sound as if the person is talking about someone. But it’s actually the whistleblower quoting and translating a documentary about herself.

(“@ashleygjovik can testify: she was fired for speaking out.”)

"When it comes to data, we want more,' an engineer wrote in an internal email."

Sounds more like Google execs to me :(

That quote could have come from me, speaking about building a feature, finding a bug, trying to figure out why something behaves the way it does. Data helps. More data is often good. Research, approval of medication, all of this is based on gathering real-world data, as much as possible, as diverse as possible.

The question is how to acquire that data ethically (consent etc.), how to handle it safely and how to dispose of it when it’s no longer needed. But the quote itself out of context is really not much, especially since the data seems to be acquired from people that voluntarily joined a program to gather such data.

Same. I have uncountably many times made statements like "all the data are belong to us", the quote out of context is meaningless and says nothing about ethical handling of data, which rests on informed consent and secure handling, not random quips.

Which reveals a bias that could use some adjustment, no?

I personally don't think the quote itself is evil, it should be taken as what it is: A quote with insufficient context.

But whatever one's interpretation is, the mental exercise is to not let the judgement of it be distorted of what your brain WANTS it to be.

I find it hard to trust her when she seems hellbent on revealing technological secrets then wondering why Apple would want to keep them hidden. Even small businesses keep their leads and trade secrets hidden, why is it suddenly "omerta" when Apple does it?

And that's another thing, why is she trying so hard to paint Apple a certain way? Omerta, so Apple is the mafia now? It reeks of forced meme. It makes sense that this all happened after she got a law degree.

This comments section: "Apple can do no wrong."

*Looking at evidences and quotes* "Nah, sounds more like <unrelated other company>"

One chooses to work on health, privacy, face / fingerprint / camera apps on iPhone, are given a work iPhone with proprietary / internal experimental software explicitly for use by employees, and are somehow surprised that part of the clearly disclosed and understood purpose is to collect data for use / development of the software? I don't get where term "whistleblower" has any applicability here. There's no secret or violation of what an employee has agreed to.

Sounds like someone has an inflated sense of being a victim. Or at least manufacturing some story to get attention.

One thing not included in the tweets but in the original article in French is that Apple does ask for permission from the employees for all of those programs, including the one called Glimmer.

It's a non-story.

Looks like this person was not part of the Silicon Vally bros mentality, and that doesn't work well. A lot of people are ok to make all their life mixed with their company, it could provide them some fun. But overall, this way of life is going to fail on them: one has to remember that the company won't care about them.

I’m surprised to see that Ashley has a Wikipedia page. I would not have thought the allegations to be notable enough. But Wikipedia editors seem to disagree in an Article for Deletion [1], citing that there are high-quality sources. News outlets will easily pick up a story about taking on Apple - or anything anti-tech for that matter - and Ashley herself has been very active about it for years. She runs a consulting firm in her name that seems to focus on megacorporation reform but also advertises herself for leadership consulting. The LLC also runs several websites related to the Apple saga: gjovik.co, ashleygjovik.com, whatsintheair.org, justiceatapple.org, iwhistleblower.org

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...

I am a bit perplexed. Working on bad soil -- okay, that's something to care about.

But: the "whistleblower" works in a software company, in the middle of a AI race, where data is a fundamental part of the equation -- no data, no AI --, and they complain that their employer asks that they provide as much data as they can, *while being payed by such employer*? To be honest I don't get it. Why is this a problem? How is Apple (or any other company) supposed to produce good ML/AI models without data? Mine is a true perplexity, not a rethorical question: why is everyone so worried about this?

I'd argue that, if Apple wants to claim it cares about its users' privacy, it shouldn't be collecting huge amounts of data from users. A company doesn't need to do everything that's profitable all at the same time, and I believe that this will compromise Apple's well-earned image as the privacy-focused hardware and OS maker.

I don’t think it will compromise that image at all. Siri is locked on your device. Face ID can now protect your drivers license in several states.

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