> To further intimidate any current Apple employee who might dare consider leaving Apple, Apple’s complaint shows that it is monitoring and examining its employees’ phone records and text messages, in a stunning and disquieting invasion of privacy.
I used to work in IT, and have rolled out MDM programs for startups before.
What needs to happen is a signed contract between the employer and the employee stating exactly what the current capabilities of the MDM are, and under what scenarios the employer can change those capabilities. This needs to be separate from their employment agreement.
I hope for transparency in this matter.
However, it's (morally questionable but) common practice (and actually CYA legally-motivated more often than not) in all corporations and even smaller companies.
We might naively expect Apple to behave differently in this instance because of their marketing stance, their privacy-minded public/commercial image. Until you realize it's just that: posture, image, product. The point is business-minded designs, not morally-driven values, the alignment of both being serendipitous, circumstancial. The "why" is customer seduction, not social politics, let alone HR policy (and to be really fair, they never communicated externally on that, in their usual secretive behavior).
TL;DR: It's great when you sell a product that supports values you agree with, but let's not confuse sales/marketing/PR with management/legal/HR. A corporation has many heads who do not operate in the same space nor speak to the same object.