One of the axes that has guided Apple’s trajectory in recent years has been privacy.
Free from the ties that Google or Facebook have with the advertising market – and that they force to collect meticulous information from users – Apple has been able to position itself as the technological company that can best protect the personal data of its customers.
Several employees of the company, however, denounce that reality is different when you work for Apple.
A report of the publication The Verge has gathered several testimonies of ex-employees who point to serious problems in the form in which the company treats the personal data of its own employees.
They must, above all, the way in which Apple manages the work devices and ICloud accounts, since it does not allow their employees to separate work life of personal life and, in case of breaking the relationship with Apple, it is left
With all the employee data that there is on your work devices: be professional or personal.
Apple employees use many of the icloud tools on their day to day, such as storage space for shared documents or pages, number and keynote.
The company gives all its workers 2 TB of storage space in iCloud and several devices (Macs, iPhones and iPads) to carry out your work.
Those who already have an iPhone can choose that the company pays its monthly telephone fee instead of receiving a new device.
But Apple does not allow creating iCloud accounts with the work emails.
During the high process, most ends up using your personal account.
Several ex-employees have commented to The Vise that this practice is advised even from the direction of the respective divisions and in the texts themselves of the registration system.
The reason is that it rather facilitates the management of these devices.
Otherwise, employees would have to use two telephones (one personal and other work, since the iPhone only allow you to activate an iCloud account at any given time) or two Macs and create an iCloud user with a mail account
Alternative, that is not the work, when they are registered as workers of the company.
Once you choose to use the personal account, however, Apple has access to information that in theory should be, staff.
In the USA Various judicial sentences give capacity to companies for
Access emails and files from your employees if you are related to your work.
Since in the case of Apple these files and messages are associated with the same iCloud account in which employees store personal information, complications emerge.
By abandoning your job, for example, Apple requires employees to return devices (computers and telephones) without formatting, with all their work files present for audit processes.
But these phones also have messages, photos, files and personal contacts that workers are forced to deliver to the company.
Other workers complain that the way in which internal processes of proof of new products are implemented favor that the personal data of employees end up in the hands of the company.
It is often asked to install private beta versions of new tools that collect data from telephones as part of the testing process.
As these functions have to be tested systematically several times a day, having them on a secondary telephone is impractical.
Apple recognizes this situation openly.
He even tells his workers who should not “consider their devices as private if they are used to perform work tasks”, given that Apple frequently performs internal audits and investigations to avoid filtrations to the press or industrial espionage.
The report serves as a complement for a whole series of testimonies that several ex-employees of Apple have begun to publish these days.
Grouped and selected under the hashtag #appletoo (in reference to the #Metoo movement), these experiences paint a very unfavorable image of the company.
Several employees, for example, claim to have suffered abuse by colleagues and customers, or have seen their chances of vanising vanishing racial or sexual discrimination.
In many cases the complaints to the Human Resources Department have not been heard or, they say, retaliated against them have been taken by raising their voice.
