Ruling comes as part of second phase of landmark trial that found social media company enabled harm against users

A New Mexico court has ordered Meta, the parent company of Facebook, to pay $567m into a fund aimed at redressing adverse mental health impacts from the social media giant’s platforms.

The Thursday ruling comes as a part of the second phase of a landmark trial the social media giant lost in March. At the time, a jury found that the company knowingly harmed children’s mental health and concealed what it knew about child sexual exploitation on its platforms, and imposed the maximum penalty: a $375m fine.

Juli Clover:

The way Apple combines work and personal iCloud accounts left some employees able to access confidential documents after departing the company, reports The Information. The site spoke to more than half a dozen former Apple employees who were unknowingly left with access to sensitive content.

[…]

Apple told The Information that the OpenAI lawsuit is unrelated to any files left available on iCloud and that it does not pursue legal claims against former employees who accidentally have Apple documents in their personal iCloud accounts.

[…]

In a now-settled legal dispute, chip company Rivos claimed Apple intentionally lets former employees retain access to files “as part of a planned effort to generate a pretextual basis to sue the employees and their new employer for ‘stealing’ Apple material.” In the Rivos case, an employee was targeted for keeping work files in his personal iCloud account.

Andrew Orr:

The documents included confidential material such as plans for product launch events. The former employees said they made no effort to retain access and unexpectedly found the files mixed with their personal iCloud data.

The problem reportedly grew from Apple’s practice of encouraging employees to connect their personal Apple IDs to company-funded iCloud storage.

[…]

Apple also relied heavily on iMessage for workplace conversations and file sharing before rolling out Slack around 2019. Former employees could retain old iMessage conversations and attachments, while Apple could terminate their Slack access when they left.

John Gruber (Mastodon):

If you use your personal Apple ID, you get a magic “Apple Work” folder in iCloud Drive. When you leave Apple, that “Apple Work” folder disappears. But any other files or folders that were shared with you that were outside that magic folder are still in your iCloud Drive, because it’s still your personal iCloud account.

[…]

You still have the same Apple ID account, even though you no longer have an employee @apple.com email account. Overall, this is a humane way of dealing with digital identity. Your Apple ID account is you, the person, not “example@icloud.com”, one specific unique email address. And you, the person, may well have multiple email addresses — all of which can be associated with your one Apple ID account. That makes Apple IDs more nuanced and complicated than a simple mapping of one email address = one account. And it obviously makes access restrictions more complicated.

Yesterday, OpenAI released messages to show that Apple employees (with permission) retained access to the departing employee’s personal iCloud account so that they could access work files that were stored there. It’s just a mess that both the software and corporate policy encourage mixing everything in one account.

Eric Schwarz:

As many things I know about Apple, this whole thing both makes perfect sense and feels absolutely bonkers.

Previously:

• OpenAI Open Letter Responds to Apple Lawsuit
• Apple Sues OpenAI Over Trade Secrets
• Privacy for Apple Employees

Ryan Merket (Hacker News, PDF):

The company said his performance was the reason, according to a lawsuit Boardman filed in San Francisco Superior Court. Boardman says that explanation was a pretext. His version of the story begins three years earlier, inside Apple’s technical relationship with the largest wireless carriers in the United States, with a category of data capable of identifying nearly every phone on the network.

[…]

Apple considered serial numbers and IMEIs personally identifiable information under its internal policies, Boardman alleges. Representatives working with carriers other than AT&T required the carrier to obtain a customer release before Apple supplied the data. The Apple representative assigned to AT&T did not enforce that requirement, according to the complaint. Boardman says the identifiers were then transmitted through “unsecured email communications.”

He reported the practice to his manager and sought guidance from Apple’s legal department. He alleges that the company never gave him a written response.

I don’t think he has much of a legal case. Apple was probably within its rights to fire him if what he refused to do was against company policy but not illegal. It doesn’t sound like Apple is disputing that, at least not yet.

However, I think this is interesting because:

• This seems to be another case, like yesterday’s story, where the interests of the customer and the carrier are at odds, and Apple leans towards the latter.

• It shows that a policy is no guarantee, because it depends on humans choosing to follow it. There are other cases where Apple has been able to engineer privacy into the system. But some data is not end-to-end encrypted, so consent is a formal but a not technical requirement.

Previously:

• Apple Upgrade
• Advertising Cognitive Dissonance
• App Store Personalized Recommendations and Keylogging
• UK Again Wants iCloud Backdoor