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