12-10-2024
A current Apple employee is suing the company for allegedly spying on its workers through their personal iCloud accounts and non-work devices. Amar Bhakta has worked in Apple’s advertising technology department since 2020. He claims the company requires employees to give up their right to personal privacy to work there, including allowing Apple to “engage in physical video and electronic surveillance of them” wherever they are and after they are no longer working for Apple. The plaintiff alleges these policies violate California law. He brought the suit under the California Private Attorneys General Act, which empowers employees to sue on behalf of the state for labor violations.
Bhakta states that Apple pushes workers to use their own iPhones at work. The data on these phones is subjected to search. Workers allegedly must link their personal iCloud accounts to the company, allowing Apple to see an employee’s location and other information at any time. Apple purportedly used these types of policies to harm Bhakta’s ability to find other employment. He asserts, for example, that Apple prohibited him from engaging in public speaking about digital advertising and made him remove any job-specific information from his LinkedIn page. He compares Apple to a prison yard where employees are subjected to “Apple’s all-seeing eye.” The Verge reported in 2021 that Apple workers shared concerns with them about privacy after the company required employees to link their personal accounts and devices to their jobs.
Apple issued a statement expressly denying Bhakta’s claims. The company said, “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."