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Comment by wmf | Hacker News Reader

This guy is going to lose. If a company is violating no laws and your manager tells you to drop it, you can either drop it or quit. You don't get to choose how to interpret company policy.

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I agree this engineer will probably lose the case because Apple has better lawyers, but I believe your underlying argument to be incorrect. If your manager asks you to violate company policy, then the correct response is to not violate company policy and instead contact HR/legal. Otherwise, saying “my manager made me do it” will not save you if heads start to roll. This applies to both policies that are strictly internal as well as policies that are due to an underlying law. When it comes down to it, neither you nor your manager actually interpret laws or internal policies.

The article says he did contact legal and I guess they declined to intervene.

HR will also not protect you "if heads start to roll". They're there to protect the company.

No, he will lose the case because because when you are hired to, say, be an auto technician, then you can't refuse to do oil changes when your boss tells you to to do them because you are convinced the customer would really be better off in an EV, and that this is important for the environment, and you want to make a moral stance.

If you want to take a moral stance to not do your job, you quit. You can give a long, eloquent speech if you want. You can write an essay about why you quit. You can start a gofundme. But you do not get to refuse to do your job and keep drawing a salary. That is trying to make a moral stance without a cost. It has nothing to do with Apple having better lawyers, and everything to do with the engineer not understanding what a job is, or what a moral stance is. The moral stance part is where you forego the income from doing something you disagree with, not refusing to do it and getting to keep the income.

At any large employer you sign an agreement to follow the employee handbook and internal policies. They all say the same thing: don't violate the policies even if directed to by your manager.

In this case Apple's legal department had identified the serials and IMEIs as PII.

This is why the case is in civil court and not criminal (because Apple didn't violate any "laws" as you claim). It is a contract dispute.

Boardman notified Apple’s legal team. At that point it was their decision to make. If they had told him to stop, that’d be one thing. But they didn’t, and it wasn’t up to Boardman to interpret the policy differently.

The employee didn’t have a contract with Apple so it isn’t a contract dispute. These would be statutory causes of action (also civil, but different than contract law) based on the claims in the suit. The plaintiff alleges Apple broke the law, but specifically whistleblower retaliation and disability discrimination statutes, not consumer privacy laws (which is sort of a secondary concern to the whistleblower claim, since those protections can apply even if no law was actually broken).

There's a non-zero chance that Apple might settle if this gets sufficient media coverage, rather than letting it drag on for years making headlines and causing PR damage that exceeds what it would take to buy him off. Even if not illegal, this is surely not the kind of headline Apple wants to be in the news for.

Yeah, it's almost always better to settle than to go to court. But he's going to get less than he's asking for. And I bet he really wants an apology which he won't get.

That sounds better for him than dropping it?

Yeah, this guy picked a weird thing to take a stand on. Apple corporate policy is not enforceable by state courts. IMEI to serial mapping is not a protected data class in any way in the US. I'm actually confused that this had to be handled by a person, one would assume that AT&T would've just had access to this data as a carrier.

>If a company is violating no laws and...

according to the article, he alleges Apple was doing something "without required customer releases"; there's at least the implication that a regulation is being broken, do you know something extra about this?

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