* 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!
* 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...
#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).
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.
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.
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.
There is another option, organize. Stay and fight for better conditions. Workers have always had the ability to enact change, when intentionally work together. It's more difficult but the potential gains are greater. This is how we got the 40 hour work week.
"Divided we beg, united we bargain"
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."
(“@ashleygjovik can testify: she was fired for speaking out.”)
Sounds more like Google execs to me :(
The question is how to acquire that data ethically (consent etc.), how to handle it safely and how to dispose of it when it’s no longer needed. But the quote itself out of context is really not much, especially since the data seems to be acquired from people that voluntarily joined a program to gather such data.
I personally don't think the quote itself is evil, it should be taken as what it is: A quote with insufficient context.
But whatever one's interpretation is, the mental exercise is to not let the judgement of it be distorted of what your brain WANTS it to be.
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.
Sounds like someone has an inflated sense of being a victim. Or at least manufacturing some story to get attention.
It's a non-story.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...
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?
