Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/08/29/apple-cleans-up-siris-privac.html
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Sounds to me like, if they could read the writing on the wall, they got a month’s severance, which is pretty good for a temp gig.
When you can see a corporate shitstorm coming, it’s almost always better to be one of the first ones to leave than to wait and see how it turns out. Beat the rush.
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Screwing over employees and shifting their duties over to customers/products who’ll do the work for free: late stage capitalism!
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If you’re a contractor working on the Death Star, you should know that your life is at risk.
That’s why I don’t feel bad messing with telemarketers. If you choose to work doing something you know is annoying or reprehensible, don’t be surprised when you get fired or toyed with. If you’re listening to people’s private conversations, alarm bells should be going off and if they don’t…well I don’t feel bad if you get canned.
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seriously. no love for people who fuck privacy. even if you’re at the bottom of the totem pole. you gonna use that tired old nazi argument, eh? just doing your jobs, eh? Hey, I hear the concentration camps in US are hiring! Why not immigrate here and beef up the corporate contracts of even worse companies? Everyone makes compromise in this world - some in a much more asshole-y way than others. “hey siri, send email to everyone at apple corp, subject GFY”
Day one:
OMG APPLE HAS PEOPLE VALIDATING THAT WHAT I SAY TO SIRI IS BEING TRANSCRIBED CORRECTLY!!! __AND__THEY__AREN’T__EVEN__APPLE__EMPLOYEES__THEY’RE__TEMPS!!!
_OMG___OMG___OMG___HOW___EVIL!!!
Day two:
Apple no longer uses temps to validate Siri.
_OMG___OMG___OMG___HOW___EVIL!!!
Seems to me that the fault with terminating the temps lies with those who couldn’t contemplate Temps validating Siri. What was Apple supposed to do? pay them to do no work?
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Obligs:
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And of course:
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I have a rocky relationship with Siri. If anyone was transcribing my requests (few as they have been) I hope they were amused by my replies of, “You’re fucking useless, Siri,” when – almost without fail – it didn’t do what I needed it to do.
Apple laying off the workforce doesn’t surprise me in the least. On the plus side, hopefully since they are in Europe, they are in countries that have better social services than we have here in the “land of the free, home of the brave.”
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Yeah, I gotta agree. You guys are never satisfied.
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I don’t think @SeamusBellamy’s problem is with Apple no longer using temps to monitor conversations for accuracy. That’s a good thing.
The complaint was in them not transitioning the temps to other positions in which they could finish out their contracts, and instead casting them to the wind with next to no notice. You know, as if they weren’t worth a damn.
But I guess they those two positions be conflated into the same position, if that’s how you want to roll.
Or pay them to do some other kind of work. A corporate product producing behemoth the size of Apple could find positions for 300-ish people if it wanted. It may have taken effort though, so fuck it.
Hell, it could give them each a million dollars and send them on their way without making more than a blip on the balance sheets. So paying them to do no work would be simple as shit.
But “nah, fuck those guys. Their usefulness is over.”
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I’m sure they could have used those 300 people to, like, wash windows or repave the parking lots.
Don’t put any of the blame on people telling their secrets to their phones, though.
What do you expect will happen when you encourage a company to spy on you by enabling its spy port?
Sure, just ask employees who have likely never strapped into a safety harness or been trained to use a window-washing rig to just jump into that. Or pave parking lots without any training.
The reality is, it would cost way more to train them (and take way longer) than to hire people who already know how to do those jobs.
That’s the whole point of temps: when you’re done with them, you let them go!
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Could someone clarify if ‘vendor companies’ = temp or staffing agencies?
And any word on what the contracts actually were? Like a year? Or something more silicon-valley-bro-ish half-day-rolling-renewal-as-needed type thing?
Not always. Workforce in Florida contracted with companies who used the temp service employment like a proving ground. My boss hired me after finishing a project, citing that she’d had many successful hires and saved a lot of hassle in the hiring process.
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“Apple Rewards Employees It Admits Invaded User Privacy With New Jobs”
“Apple Hands Golden Parachute To Employees It Admits Invaded Users’ Privacy”
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Right. Because invading privacy was the temps idea. Gotcha. Good thing they punished them. I hope the temps learned their lesson.
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I’m not suggesting you’re wrong. I’m just saying that–as others have pointed out–there’s no pleasing people who are intent on finding fault with an underlying problem and any and all efforts to rectify it.
So you allowed a corporation to record everything you said, then got cross because they listened to it? Why not add a camera, give them some visuals. I’m sure just listening to everyday life (sex, drugs, DV) must be very frustrating.
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