Hacker News Reader

Comment by justboxing | Hacker News Reader

> In a tearful video, Peterson explains her father violated an Apple company rule by allowing her to film the unreleased handset at Apple’s campus.

The key word here is "unreleased".

Even if she released the video after the keynote, it was filmed in Apple's Labs / Offices a month before, when the new iphone was in an unreleased state. Pretty sure their NDA forbids such things for obvious reasons. Design leaks (from videos) could potential cost companies like Apple MILLIONS in lost revenue.

NDAs are there for a reason. I see nothing wrong with what Apple did here.

View on HN

I imagine most people here agree, but feel some sympathy for the engineer who wasn't malicious, just careless.

Agreed, but with that level of access, one cannot afford to be careless. And Apple could care less whether it was malicious, or careless or plain stupid.

The intent doesn't change the consequences for Apple.

True. Also I feel kind of bad for the kid which adds another semitragic element.

I don't feel bad for anyone, here. The father was flat-out stupid: there's no excuse for him not knowing Apple's policies around this sort of thing. The daughter should know better than to even take a video of an unreleased Apple product while in the office, let alone release it. These people are just incredibly foolish, and firing the guy is entirely justified. They're lucky Apple isn't suing the daughter for what I can only assume is a breach of the NDA she presumably signed before being let into the office.

I personally would not work for a company that has such high requirements for strict secrecy that Apple does, but this guy did, and assuredly knew that going in.

Suing the daughter? I think many people will not think bad for the engineer getting fired, but I doubt suing the daughter would be worth the damage in reputation such a lawsuit would cost.

Oh agreed; just pointing out that Apple likely could do that, and would even probably legitimately win such a suit.

Its "couldn't care less".

Well, this has been argued to death here :) https://english.stackexchange.com/q/706/61174

I don’t know how to feel on this one. Usually I agree but this is Apple and he’s an employee. If he was able to get an iPhone there’s no way he doesn’t know what the rules are. There’s no way he doesn’t know that Apple is extremely strict about security. He’s probably been through a couple of the “we are tightening down on leaks” things over the last year or two. If he’s been there long enough he probably remembers the big mess about the employee who lost their iPhone four before it was released.

Heck we got massive firmware leaks a month or two ago, he had to of known about that and how mad people were.

I don’t know how Sony, or Samsung, or Microsoft, or other companies handle this kind of stuff. But Apple is well known for taking an extremely strong stance.

Part of me thinks the daughter should’ve known better, it’s not like she’s a 12-year-old. If this was filmed a month before it was posted then she had plenty of time to think about it. It’s not like she live streamed it in then realized later that it was a mistake.

I want to think the employee just had a lapse in judgment and was just trying to have fun with/impress his daughter. I hope that’s all it was.

It’s kind of unfortunate but it was 100% predictable what would happen the instant this went online.

> Part of me thinks the daughter should’ve known better, it’s not like she’s a 12-year-old.

Sure, but the primary cause of the leak was the dad allowing her to film it at all. Based on common sense alone (aside from internal training/warnings/etc that Apple employees must go through to ge their hands on pre-release hardware), in the presence of any camera he either should not have pulled out the phone, or told his daughter to put her phone/camera away before pulling it out.

He was certainly in the wrong. I was just thinking the daughter was old enough to know that he was in the wrong and that she shouldn’t have participated.

I don't think this situation is worth much attention, honestly, but that said I do find it very easy to imagine being a person who doesn't understand how much of a breach such a video might be. I would be extremely cautious, because I'm a cautious person and because I know Apple is very secretive. And I'm a 'techie'

But most people are not like me. And even imagining a twenty-something version of me I can imagine doing something like this without much thought.

Agreed.

One thing that struck me when watching the video - it's not just the father interacting with the camera, it's other Apple employees who very clearly know that they're being filmed. I wonder how come none of the employees said anything?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com