[khazhoux]

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!

[yellow_lead]

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...

[prepend]

#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).

[viraptor]

> #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.

[azinman2]

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.

[paganel]

> * 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.

[prepend]

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.

[viraptor]

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.

[prepend]

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...

[viraptor]

> 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.