from Hacker News

Apple: Whistleblower about Working Conditions

by dalf on 3/16/23, 7:25 AM with 28 comments

• by khazhoux on 3/16/23, 8:00 AM

  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!

• by unxdfa on 3/16/23, 8:02 AM

  Sounds like when I worked for a large defence contractor. Except they didn’t have the competence to pull it off as well.

  I got to the end of this Twitter thread and basically shrugged. If you don’t like corporate policy, leave, then make reasonable comments outside of any NDA you have signed. Trying to do anything internally unless you have a senior management position is always futile. And don’t come across as a dick, which the person does here.

• by voytec on 3/16/23, 8:41 AM

  I'll play Devils' advocate. Has this person not seen, and agreed to, rules for using pre-release devices or even agreements for released devices? Apple became surveillance company under Cook and this should be perfectly clear to Apple employees.

  To quote South Park's "HumancentiPad" episode:

  > Hold up. Here it is right here: "by clicking Agree, you are also acknowledging that Apple may sew your mouth to the butthole of another iTunes user" (...) "Apple and its subsidiaries may also, if necessary, sew yet another person's mouth onto your butthole, making you a being that shares one gastral tract." Hmmm, I'm gonna click onnn... "Decline."

• by Xylakant on 3/16/23, 8:08 AM

  It took me a moment to realize that the thread starts with a quote that makes is sound as if the person is talking about someone. But it’s actually the whistleblower quoting and translating a documentary about herself.

  (“@ashleygjovik can testify: she was fired for speaking out.”)

• by kramerger on 3/16/23, 7:54 AM

  "When it comes to data, we want more,' an engineer wrote in an internal email."

  Sounds more like Google execs to me :(

• by acumenical on 3/16/23, 8:09 AM

  I find it hard to trust her when she seems hellbent on revealing technological secrets then wondering why Apple would want to keep them hidden. Even small businesses keep their leads and trade secrets hidden, why is it suddenly "omerta" when Apple does it?

  And that's another thing, why is she trying so hard to paint Apple a certain way? Omerta, so Apple is the mafia now? It reeks of forced meme. It makes sense that this all happened after she got a law degree.

• by alimbada on 3/16/23, 9:56 AM

  This comments section: "Apple can do no wrong."

• by kepler1 on 3/16/23, 8:36 AM

  One chooses to work on health, privacy, face / fingerprint / camera apps on iPhone, are given a work iPhone with proprietary / internal experimental software explicitly for use by employees, and are somehow surprised that part of the clearly disclosed and understood purpose is to collect data for use / development of the software? I don't get where term "whistleblower" has any applicability here. There's no secret or violation of what an employee has agreed to.

  Sounds like someone has an inflated sense of being a victim. Or at least manufacturing some story to get attention.

• by iLoveOncall on 3/16/23, 10:10 AM

  One thing not included in the tweets but in the original article in French is that Apple does ask for permission from the employees for all of those programs, including the one called Glimmer.

  It's a non-story.

• by gregoriol on 3/16/23, 9:49 AM

  Looks like this person was not part of the Silicon Vally bros mentality, and that doesn't work well. A lot of people are ok to make all their life mixed with their company, it could provide them some fun. But overall, this way of life is going to fail on them: one has to remember that the company won't care about them.

• by reledi on 3/16/23, 10:03 AM

  I’m surprised to see that Ashley has a Wikipedia page. I would not have thought the allegations to be notable enough. But Wikipedia editors seem to disagree in an Article for Deletion [1], citing that there are high-quality sources. News outlets will easily pick up a story about taking on Apple - or anything anti-tech for that matter - and Ashley herself has been very active about it for years. She runs a consulting firm in her name that seems to focus on megacorporation reform but also advertises herself for leadership consulting. The LLC also runs several websites related to the Apple saga: gjovik.co, ashleygjovik.com, whatsintheair.org, justiceatapple.org, iwhistleblower.org

  1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...

• by etamponi on 3/16/23, 8:16 AM

  I am a bit perplexed. Working on bad soil -- okay, that's something to care about.

  But: the "whistleblower" works in a software company, in the middle of a AI race, where data is a fundamental part of the equation -- no data, no AI --, and they complain that their employer asks that they provide as much data as they can, *while being payed by such employer*? To be honest I don't get it. Why is this a problem? How is Apple (or any other company) supposed to produce good ML/AI models without data? Mine is a true perplexity, not a rethorical question: why is everyone so worried about this?