Allegation: Apple allegedly spying on employees' iPhones
In a lawsuit in the USA, the tech giant Apple is accused of monitoring its employees' data and suppressing their expression of opinion.
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The US company Apple is facing accusations of collecting data from company-owned devices, including private iPhones used by employees for work. The company is demanding that its employees waive their right to privacy and is monitoring them, claims Apple employee Amar Bhakta, who has sued the tech company.
Bhakta, who has been with the company since 2020 and works as Digital Ad Tech Operations Manager, filed a lawsuit on Monday in the Supreme Court of the US state of California in Santa Clara County. In it, he accuses the iPhone manufacturer of accessing employee data via devices managed by the company, as first reported by the US news portal Semafor. According to Bhakta, Apple's guidelines, which all new employees must sign, allow the company to access, search and monitor all data on employees' devices and in their iCloud accounts.
Far-reaching access to data
According to the lawsuit, many Apple employees, including Bhakta himself, use their personal iPhones and Macs for work. In this case , they are required to use their personal iCloud accounts and agree to use software that gives the company access to all data stored on the device and its location in real time. "The data may include emails, contacts, reminders, entire photo libraries, internet browsing data, health data, messages, 'smart home' data, passwords, apps, files, documents, calendars, notes and backups," it says. While employees could use a work device and have a separate iCloud account just for work, the lawsuit states that Apple "actively discourages" work-only iCloud accounts.
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Bhakta also claims that Apple suppresses the expression of his employees' opinions. For example, he was prohibited from taking part in public lectures on digital advertising. He was also forced to remove information about his work at Apple from his LinkedIn page –, a violation of Californian labor law, according to Bhakta.
"Apple ecosystem is a prison yard"
"For Apple employees, the Apple ecosystem is not a walled garden. It's a prison yard. A panopticon in which employees are exposed to Apple's omniscient eye both on and off duty," the lawsuit states almost poetically. Apple naturally sees things differently. "At Apple, we're focused on building the best products and services in the world, and we work to protect our teams' inventions for customers," an Apple spokesperson explained in an emailed statement to tech portal The Verge. "Every employee has the right to speak up about their wages, hours and working conditions, and this is part of our Code of Conduct, which all employees are trained on annually. We disagree with these allegations [Bhaktas, note] and believe they are unfounded."
The lawsuit was filed on the basis of the California Private Attorneys General Act. This law allows employees to sue against labor law violations on behalf of the state of California. According to Semafor, if Apple is found liable by the court, the company could face fines for each violation, multiplied by the number of employees affected.
(akn)
