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The court decision itself is worth reading for a revealing look behind the curtain. [0] >> In Slack communications dated November 16, 2021, the Apple employees

• bitpush 1y ago
  Jesus Christ. How worse can they be? Willfully malicious
  • Jensson 1y ago
    Now we will have corporate training programs teaching us to say "inform the user" when we mean "scare the user", and then this wont show up in court. Just like how Microsoft taught us to never say "crush the competition". They will do all the same things though.
    • lazide 1y ago
      Then that training will get called into evidence (like Google’s prior training re: anti competitive training) to prove they were being intentionally anti-competitive, and rinse repeat.
      • scarface_74 1y ago
        I’ve worked for one BigTech company in my career and there were a list of banned words we couldn’t say in writing. The one word I remember we couldn’t say was “moat”.
        • BeFlatXIII 1y ago
          I wonder if they implemented some filter that prevented messages containing those words from posting. Return a 401 or 403.
          • scarface_74 1y ago
            You give way too much credit to the capabilities of Chime. (how do you say where you worked without saying where you worked)
      • Wobbles42 1y ago
        I received training like this over 20 years ago as a brand new engineer at my first job. The training was literally about how to avoid writing emails that could create legal liability due to careless language. Emails that came out during the Ford Pinto lawsuits were used as examples. It was all carefully worded to be about not being misperceived in court. That job was at an avionics company working on safety critical systems. They paid tons of lip service to always placing safety first -- and from what I personally witnessed, at least at that time, the concern was genuine. There was a culture of taking the responsibility seriously, at least at the engineering level I interacted with. Even acting in good faith though, things happen. Planes crash (usually due to pilot error), and when they do everyone gets sued, and when that happens careless language represents a risk for a company, even if they did everything right. Having moved on to consumer tech, I haven't seen similar cultures of doing the "right thing". That could be the modern world, my own cynicism, or just the differences inherent to industries where lives aren't explicitly on the line. Regardless, it's not at all hard to imagine that employees can be taught to self censor in ways that won't themselves create more liability.
  • tokioyoyo 1y ago
    Honestly, I’ve seen way, waay, waaaaaaaaaaaaaay worse in internal comms in different companies. Not trying to defend Apple, but this just sounds like an average conversation to me.
    • int_19h 1y ago
      I mean, that's just evidence that they really are doing illegal shit and should be punished for it.
      • vkou 1y ago
        Or that they are doing legal shit that has the appearance of doing illegal shit, and will get into a lot of trouble more trouble than they want if it ever goes to trial. Nobody stops you from texting your friends about buying ten pounds of cocaine, (when you actually meant confectioner's sugar), but putting it in writing may make your life more difficult if at some point, by happenstance, you might end up the defendant in a narcotics trial. Even if you are completely innocent.
      • tokioyoyo 1y ago
        Eh, every single group chat I've been a part of is littered with this kind of a talk.
    • fennecbutt 1y ago
      It's evidence of malfeasance, that's the topic at hand. Otherwise it's just whataboutism right.
• caf 1y ago
  The phrase "incandescent with rage" comes to mind when reading that order. A couple of choice quotes: To hide the truth, Vice-President of Finance, Alex Roman, outright lied under oath. This is an injunction, not a negotiation. There are no do-overs once a party willfully disregards a court order. Time is of the essence. The Court will not tolerate further delays. As previously ordered, Apple will not impede competition. The Court enjoins Apple from implementing its new anticompetitive acts to avoid compliance with the Injunction.
  • Gareth321 1y ago
    She also referred Alex Roman's actions and everyone else complicit for review of contempt of court, which carries a possible prison sentence. I never thought Apple would outright defy the courts to the degree they'd risk a prison term for the executives.
    • 2OEH8eoCRo0 1y ago
      They'll defy the courts for profit but not for warrants and surveillance requests. Telling Do they defy the courts in China or just in the US?
    • lazide 1y ago
      Give the current situation with people ignoring the court (cough into the presidency) with no consequences, what do you expect them to do? Take the courts seriously? Now, practically speaking, that exposes them to the Court taking all their frustration out on the execs. Oops.
      • damonll 1y ago
        You do realize that they ignored the court order -during- Biden's administration, not Trump's, right?
        • esotericimpl 1y ago
          [dead]
• kmfrk 1y ago
  It's so jarring to get these kinds of message, especially for compliance with EU directives, because it's so obviously designed to look un-Apple-like which triggers some sort of malware or scam heuristic without the typical nice Apple presentation. Ironically it ends up getting flagged as some deliberate Apple malicious compliance BS which just sours you on the whole iOS experience.
  • raincole 1y ago
    I'm not even sure how "external website" is malicious compliance. Yes, I know the intention is to sound scary. But external website is the correct, neutral term which means... external website.
    • A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 1y ago
      To you and me, sure. On the other hand, I wonder if is intended to scare people who like and want the safety of the apple ecosystem and perceive everything as outside of it as dark web. Come to think of it, that is kinda how I see dark web.. is there a scarier place on line than that?
      • Wobbles42 1y ago
        I think it would be easy to argue that the term "external website" is neutral rather than scary sounding, if not for actual chat logs in evidence saying "let's use this term because it's scary sounding". It kind of surprises me that people working in that environment haven't been better trained about what not to write. I have zero legal background, but even twenty years ago at my very first corporate job I received a training module about legal discovery and the consequences of poorly worded emails -- and that was at a company that I genuinely believe was trying to follow the law in good faith, and was simply worried about liability due to misperception of careless language. For a team specifically working on a legal compliance project, I am with the poster above that mentioned legal teams providing oversite. If nothing else, every one of these chats should have had a lawyer logged in to provide a mental reminder to participants that the conversation really isn't private.
      • 1y ago
• hajile 1y ago
  Unless the judge actually specified the type of language to be used, this seems completely compliant. Are they supposed to say "Please use our competitor. You'll find your experience with them far superior to what we provide" or something similar?
  • jkirsteins 1y ago
    Malicious compliance is a thing. They're supposed to use neutral language.
    • hajile 1y ago
      Malicious compliance is only illegal if it doesn't actually comply.
      • DannyBee 1y ago
        This is also wrong. Good faith is a requirement. Act in bad faith, and you can still be sanctioned. Do you have any background in this, or are you just asserting what you want reality to be? Because you are just spouting wrong information that, even for a non-lawyer, would take you 10 minutes to go find and read right information.
        • Wobbles42 1y ago
          Non-lawyer here. This information is surprising to me (to be clear, I believe you, I just would have guessed otherwise). Is some degree of malicious compliance not extremely common when companies deal with the courts? From the outside it seems like the incentive would be to comply with a court order to the minimum degree required to avoid further legal consequences, but no more. Is compliance more enthusiastic that that in practice? Again, I have zero experience, but the idea of a company losing a lawsuit and then actually acting in good faith is a strange one to me. An individual might be intimidated to act in actual good faith to avoid serious consequences, but Apple as an entity can't be tossed in jail for contempt of court, right? So it would seem that it is incentivized to push it's employees to take risks like this, with the understand that they can be replaced by employees who will if they refuse.
• avar 1y ago
  The most shocking thing to me about that isn't the malicious compliance, but that even after a court injunction, and fully knowing that there could be subsequent discovery, they have people putting something like that in writing. Seriously, this is one of the top 10 largest companies in the world, and they're playing chicken with the court in order to preserve their ongoing revenue. These weren't random employees, but people part of "Project Michigan", Apple's "activities relating to Injunction compliance". How doesn't every single person that's a part of that project have an Apple lawyer hovering over them every time they get near any sort of device that can put anything on the record?
  • mytailorisrich 1y ago
    People put everything in writing and in videos nowadays and don't even think about it. Often it's "not so smart" criminals but we see again and again that even people are the highest levels do the same...
    • A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 1y ago
      It is not always a question of smart of vs not smart. At times, you will see people say something in an email or chat for no other reason than 'now it is part of the record'.
      • toomuchtodo 1y ago
        CYA, always be building a paper trail in systems of record. "Will this be committed to something with a retention schedule and that is subject to a potential legal hold?" hits return
  • cwmma 1y ago
    they did try to hide some of this stuff, by abusing attorney client privilege, which is one of the reasons the judge is SO pissed at them.
    • registeredcorn 1y ago