Apple will spy on workers to enforce return-to-office mandate: report

Apple will reportedly monitor employees’ attendance to ensure they meet a company requirement that they must report to the office at least three days a week.

The iPhone maker – which has always touted its strict privacy rules – will check ID records to track attendance at its corporate offices to crack down on workers who ignore the back-to-work mandate, according to tech journalist Zoë Schiffer from the Platformer Substack Blog.

Employees who don’t return to their desks three days a week could be fired, although it’s unclear if the company has adopted this as an official policy, Schiffer wrote.

Apple’s monitoring of employee ID information appears to contradict the company’s commitment to protecting users’ privacy and data.

The Post reached out to Apple for comment.

Schiffer has also reported that Twitter owner Elon Musk emailed his employees at 2:30 a.m. Tuesday with the message “office is not optional.”

According to Schiffer, Musk was reportedly upset that Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters was half empty.

The Post reached out to Twitter for comment.

Apple employees have fretted over the return-to-the-office executive order announced last year following the lifting of the coronavirus lockdown and the nationwide mass vaccination campaign.

The Cupertino, California-based tech giant had repeatedly delayed its plans to bring its employees back to the office during the pandemic due to the surge in COVID cases caused by the spread of new variants.

In August, more than 1,200 Apple employees signed a petition denouncing the company’s return-to-office order, which was implemented on Labor Day.

Last spring, several Apple employees, including Blind, took to social media platforms to speak out about the company’s demands for office work.

Some employees even threatened to quit because of the problem.

“I don’t give a fuck if I ever come back to work here,” one staffer wrote on Blind.

Ian Goodfellow, who served as Apple’s director of machine learning, abruptly resigned in May in response to the company’s mandate to return to office.

Goodfellow joined Google’s DeepMind division as a contributor.

Musk, the Tesla CEO who acquired Twitter for $44 billion last October, has poked fun at Apple’s previously lax return-to-office policy.

The Twitter owner has required his employees to work overtime as part of his “hardcore” ethos.

One of those employees who joined Musk’s call, Esther Crawford, was fired, although she was photographed sleeping on the office floor after her new boss took over the company.

Tech companies were among the first to allow their employees to work from home at the start of the COVID pandemic.

But unfavorable macroeconomic conditions and the lifting of lockdowns have changed the calculus, forcing companies to reconsider their strategies.

While Apple, Amazon, Disney, Google and Meta have called their employees back to the office for most of the week.

But other technology outliers like Yelp, Spotify, Coinbase, and Dropbox have also allowed their employees to continue working remotely full-time.