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Comment by bartman | Hacker News Reader

The timeline OpenAI wants to present looks like this to me:

- Leaving employee (LE) needs a USB stick to copy data off their Mac to give to their Manager (MA) so someone at Apple still has access

- After LE left, MA has access to LE Mac and iCloud to still access some data

- At some point, LE asks MA to sign out off LE's iMessage account on that Mac as they suspect they'll get OpenAI-related messages soon and don't want Apple/MA to see them

- Eventually, MA deletes the Apple files in LE's iCloud

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Granted, Apple does do this weird thing where you're invited to use your personal iCloud (/Apple) account for work-related things (I suspect because they're just bad at supporting multiple accounts simultaneously). As part of the deal, your iCloud account gets upgraded during your employment.

But they're also quite explicit and repeat the directive (including during the exit interview) about removing Apple files from your account when you leave, and logging out of iCloud from the Apple devices you leave behind.

Also:

> At some point, LE asks MA to sign out off LE's iMessage account

You can sign out remotely, so this would've been stupid of everyone involved.

Then again, this whole situation demonstrates a level of stupidity from supposedly competent people that I wish I could say was unbelievable. Add "Making a public post about a topic under litigation" under that category too.

That's not just weird, that's completely ridiculous for the most valuable public US company.

And it gets more ridiculous when you realise Apple makes the software, the hardware, the OS, and the cloud services.

I... really question the rationale here.

Nit-but Apple has fallen to Nvidia and Alphabet, which is a sign of the times.

From what I saw, it's been leapfrogging for the past few weeks. Even if Apple is currently behind them, I don't think it's particularly fair to say it's "fallen to" them.

> I... really question the rationale here.

occam's razor...

Do you mean hanlon’s razor?

They did recently add the iCloud@Work compartment (right before I left), and it seemed like an OK compromise and kosher policy-wise.

Funny to hear that even Apple themself struggle with that. In the past it's been such a PITA for us to decide whether employees can use private account or shall use company apple ids. As we have a pretty lax policy, most of them use their private accounts to have iCloud sync or to simply access purchased apps but having a simple way for dual account usage would be too easy i guess.

Apple's always been ambivalent about big-E enterprise support.

Probably a Jobs-era vibe about work-life unification.

I am actually confused why creating an email john.doe@apple.com and separated employees work only iCloud on the email is such a problem and they want people to use personal iCloud? Not even corporate stuck in 90s does that.

If you remotely sign out, then when you delete the Apple IP files on the device, they aren't deleted off iCloud.

So it's plausible they wanted MA to check for and delete the files first, then sign out.

I wonder how deep this integration goes. I’d never want to use my personal accounts for proprietary work items. Just seems like a recipe for disaster. Also, removing a latop from iCloud doesn’t delete the imessage data already on the device.

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