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

Apple will reportedly monitor employee attendance to make sure they are complying with a company requirement that they report to the office at least three days a week.

The iPhone maker — which has always touted its strict privacy rules — will review badge records to track attendance at its corporate offices in an effort to crack down on workers who ignore the back-to-work mandate, according to tech journalist Zoë Schiffer of the Platformer Substack blog.

Employees who fail to return to their desks three days a week could be fired, though it is unclear if the company has adopted that as official policy, Schiffer wrote.

Apple’s monitoring of employees’ badge information appears to contradict the firm’s claim to be conscious of protecting users’ privacy and data.

The Post has sought comment from Apple.

Schiffer has also reported that Twitter owner Elon Musk sent his employees an email at 2:30 a.m. on Tuesday that included the message “office is not optional.”

Musk was reportedly upset that Twitter headquarters in San Francisco was half empty, according to Schiffer.

The Post has sought comment from Twitter.

Apple employees have chafed at management’s return-to-office edict, which was announced last year following the lifting of coronavirus lockdown measures and the mass-vaccination campaign nationwide.

The Cupertino, Calif.-based tech giant had delayed its plans to bring its employees back to the office several times throughout the pandemic due to surges in COVID cases driven 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 took to social media platforms, including Blind, to vent about the company’s demands for in-office work.

Some employees even threatened to quit over the issue.

“I don’t give a single f—k about ever coming back to work here,” one employee wrote on Blind.

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

Goodfellow joined Google’s DeepMind division as a contributor.

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

The Twitter owner has demanded that his employees work extra hours as part of his “hardcore” ethos.

One of those employees who bought in to Musk’s call, Esther Crawford, was fired despite the fact that 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 when the COVID pandemic began.

But adverse macroeconomic conditions as well as the lifting of lockdowns have changed the calculus and forced companies to rethink their strategies.

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

But other tech outliers such as Yelp, Spotify, Coinbase, and Dropbox have allowed their employees to continue working remotely full time.