Lawsuit accuses Apple of spying on employees' personal iPhones
A new lawsuit filed in California accuses Apple of illegally spying on its employees' devices and iCloud accounts. At the same time, the tech giant is being accused of preventing company employees from discussing pay and working conditions. The lawsuit was filed yesterday by Amar Bhakta who works in Apple's digital advertising department. The suit says that Apple requires employees to install software on the personal devices they use at work.
This software allegedly allows Apple to access certain apps on the personal devices of employees that they use as work devices. The apps that Apple can allegedly monitor include those containing email, photo libraries, health information, smart home data, and apps that store personal information. Employees are not allowed to discuss pay and working conditions with the media; at the same time, they are forbidden from being whistleblowers even under conditions that are legally protected.
Personal devices are forced to link their personal iCloud accounts to the company which gives Apple the ability to collect location data and other personal information belonging to employees when they are away from the office. The lawsuit also accuses Apple of requiring employees to agree to a policy that allows the tech giant to use electronic, physical, and video surveillance of them.
"Apple’s surveillance policies and practices chill, and thus also unlawfully restrain, employee whistleblowing, competition, freedom of employee movement in the job market, and freedom of speech."-Plaintiff's complaint from the lawsuit
Keeping employees' complaints from leaking out appears to be a major concern of Apple executives. Bhatka, the plaintiff, has worked for Apple since 2020 and was banned from talking about his job on podcasts and was told to delete comments about his working conditions from his LinkedIn profile. The same legal team working for the plaintiff also represented two women who filed a lawsuit against Apple back in June. That suit accused Apple of underpaying female employees in its engineering, marketing, and AppleCare divisions.
"For Apple’s employees, the Apple ecosystem is not a walled garden. It is a prison yard. A panopticon where employees, both on and off duty, are ever subject to Apple’s all-seeing eye."-Lawsuit
Apple released a statement that said the claims made in Bhatka's suit lack merit and added that its workers are trained annually on their rights to discuss working conditions at the company. The lawsuit notes that while Apple offers employees an Apple-owned iPhone to use at the office, the company suggests that employees bring their own iPhone which, as we stated earlier in this article, Apple can monitor.
"At Apple, we’re focused on creating the best products and services in the world and we work to protect the inventions our teams create for customers. Every employee has the right to discuss their wages, hours, and working conditions and this is part of our business conduct policy, which all employees are trained on annually. We strongly disagree with these claims and believe they lack merit."-Josh Rosenstock, Apple spokesman
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