Don’t cross Apple.
The tech giant has reportedly fired one of its iPhone X engineers after his daughter released a hands-on video with the phone before its official release on Nov. 3.
The video shows Brooke Amelia Peterson touring Apple’s California campus with her father when he tests the unreleased phone’s Apple pay feature and later hands it to her to tinker around. She shows off its new home page features and camera technology, and her dad gives a sneak peak of the new Animoji feature. In total, the hands-on lasted around 55 seconds and was quickly picked up by several Apple blogs, including 9to5Mac, which called it “probably our best look yet at the device in action.”
Apple is notorious for its secrecy and anti-leaking culture. It strictly prohibits filming on its campus, and even more so, the filming of unreleased products. After the video went viral, Peterson removed the video, reportedly at Apple’s request, but it’s since been re-uploaded by other YouTube accounts.
In a second video posted on her channel Oct. 28, Peterson revealed that Apple had since dismissed her father. Peterson said that she didn’t know her actions had violated Apple’s policies and that she had intended for the “little innocent video” to be “a fun memory of me and my family.” But the video also featured sensitive information beyond showing off the iPhone X before Apple was ready, including employee-only QR codes, as well as what The Verge suggests is a list of codenames for unreleased Apple products in the Notes app. (Apple wasn’t immediately available to confirm that Peterson’s father had been fired.)
“At the end of the day, when you work for Apple it doesn’t matter how good of a person you are,” she said in her second video. “If you break a rule, they just have no tolerance. They had to do what they had to do.” Peterson also said that neither she nor her father felt resentment over Apple’s decision. “I’m not mad at Apple,” she added. “I’m not going to stop buying Apple products.”