Apple's currently claiming the mere fact that it does "studies" on employees is secret and so any employee speech about the studies (including complaints, refusal to participate, allegations of misconduct, etc.) are secret.
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RE: https://mastodon.social/@ashleygjovik/116215001951568961
Apple's currently claiming the mere fact that it does "studies" on employees is secret and so any employee speech about the studies (including complaints, refusal to participate, allegations of misconduct, etc.) are secret.
I'd strongly suggest that Apple engineering employees consider a protest & boycott of all "voluntarily" participation in Apple's secret "user studies" until Apple executives can prove that they can do this stuff in compliance with state & federal law, if Apple can at all.
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RE: https://mastodon.social/@ashleygjovik/116215001951568961
Apple's currently claiming the mere fact that it does "studies" on employees is secret and so any employee speech about the studies (including complaints, refusal to participate, allegations of misconduct, etc.) are secret.
I'd strongly suggest that Apple engineering employees consider a protest & boycott of all "voluntarily" participation in Apple's secret "user studies" until Apple executives can prove that they can do this stuff in compliance with state & federal law, if Apple can at all.
@ashleygjovik as a researcher who does studies using human participants and has gone through dozens of IRB (ethics board) reviews... This isn't just unethical; it is actively anti-ethical. Instead of informed consent they are claiming a right to force or trick participants into research with no consent at all, and making a Bizarro World claim that the participants have no rights and deserve no protection but somehow the researchers have a right to secrecy. I'm struggling to find words to express how hideous and machiavellian this is.
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@ashleygjovik as a researcher who does studies using human participants and has gone through dozens of IRB (ethics board) reviews... This isn't just unethical; it is actively anti-ethical. Instead of informed consent they are claiming a right to force or trick participants into research with no consent at all, and making a Bizarro World claim that the participants have no rights and deserve no protection but somehow the researchers have a right to secrecy. I'm struggling to find words to express how hideous and machiavellian this is.
@guyjantic I really appreciate you saying that. Its very exhausting for me to live in their upside down world.
I wasn't that familiar with the rules but this stood out to me as wildly unethical, not to mention they're using data for commercial purposes & claiming a biz interest as basis for secrecy
Apple's saying they have biz interests in the monetization of their employee's bodies, so the employee's should be gagged about anything the employer does to their bodies - which is like 1800s shit
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@guyjantic I really appreciate you saying that. Its very exhausting for me to live in their upside down world.
I wasn't that familiar with the rules but this stood out to me as wildly unethical, not to mention they're using data for commercial purposes & claiming a biz interest as basis for secrecy
Apple's saying they have biz interests in the monetization of their employee's bodies, so the employee's should be gagged about anything the employer does to their bodies - which is like 1800s shit
@ashleygjovik That's completely horrifying. That's a Black Mirror episode or two.
As a psychological researcher I've had to take research ethics training over and over, and to go through IRB review for even the mildest survey study. Very basic principles applying to all human subjects research include
- Full informed consent for all participants except in cases where the human, societal, or scientific benefits of a study clearly justify deception of participants; and then the benefits and deception must be proportional
- Participants' information is a protected resource. An informed decision to participate in a study needs to include telling participants who will have their information, for how long, etc.
"Company profit" is not, and absolutely should never be, part of any ethics risk-benefit analysis
The US government has (I assume this hasn't been totally destroyed by DOGE, yet) a strong and constantly-developing system for managing research ethics: Thousands of IRBs (institutional review boards) that all adhere to federal ethics guidelines (many drafted after traumatizingly unethical research in the past), ethics review of all government-funded grant proposals, and recommendations (sometimes actual laws) for private or corporate research. In fact, many non-academic research projects are actually managed by IRBs; nonprofits and companies frequently contract with independent IRBs for ethics oversight of their research.
There is absolutely no reason to be ignorant of the ethical concerns involved in human subjects research. Apple is being evil and knows it is being evil.
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