Apple's ecosystem is a 'prison yard' for employees, lawsuit says

A current Apple (AAPL) employee is suing the company for illegally limiting worker freedoms through its required intellectual property agreement.

The lawsuit, filed Monday in California Superior Court in Santa Clara County by Amar Bhakta, a digital ad tech and operations manager at Apple, alleges that the company’s policies, including requiring workers to use iPhones for work and preventing them from discussing wages, are a suppression of employee speech and privacy rights in violation of state law.

In addition to requiring employees to use Apple owned or managed iPhones, the lawsuit alleges that workers are encouraged to use their iCloud account — which is linked to personal devices and those of family members — for work purposes.

“For Apple’s employees, the Apple ecosystem is not a walled garden,” the lawsuit says. “It is a prison yard. A panopticon where employees, both on and off duty, are ever subject to Apple’s all-seeing eye.”

According to the suit, Apple claims the right to search any private data stored on Apple device, including emails, photos, videos, and notes. Under the policy, Apple employees cannot disable any tracking apps on their Apple owned devices, the lawsuit claims.

Apple’s companywide policies also allegedly prevent employees from being able to discuss compensation, as well as training, recruiting, and other human resource information.

“Being able to speak openly about my work is so important to me professionally and personally,” Bhakta said in a statement. “It’s disappointing that Apple, whose ethos is privacy and confidentiality, would try to monitor and censor me. That hurts my ability to advance professionally. I hope this complaint causes Apple to change their approach to monitoring employees outside of work and reminds employees that they have the power to stand up too.”

This can also make it more difficult for employees to discuss the skills and knowledge they developed at Apple in a job search and after hire, the suit says.

“Apple’s broad speech suppression policies create a danger of discrimination going unchallenged far too long, which harms all Apple employees and Californians in general,” said Jahan Sagafi, partner at Outten & Golden, the law firm representing Bhakta.