But, in 2021 (at https://sfbayview.com/2021/03/i-thought-i-was-dying-my-apart...), "I wanted to get some formal data in the brief time before I moved out, so I hired an industrial hygienist to sample the indoor air and some of the topsoil. Despite the $1,555 I had to pay for it, the results were inconclusive."

And I would very strongly doubt the word of a People Team member as the conclusive evidence of any lying.

People Team are there to reduce the liability for the company, the company in this case are the very company in question for alleged environmental issues.

What actually happens vs what a trained People Team member knows to document are seldom the same thing, and people on the receiving end of the consequences of this seldom have their full wits about them at the time and are almost never lawyered up at that time.

If you had other receipts I'm sure people might consider them, but if your main gripe is based on what a People Team / HR person says... yeah, that's not conclusive either.

The one party I would trust most here are the EPA, and the author didn't fabricate (pun intended) the reports made by them.

YMMV but some people are crazy. The EPA is however not. But what the EPA say and what the woman claims are disparate.

Edit: to be clear I'd expect the EPA to install independently maintained monitoring equipment which is not subject to the bias of Apple or the reporter. Then collect more data!

To complicate it further, this woman did in fact live on top of an industrially-zone area which had industrial contamination on site. The apartments are very new (finished construction in ~2019) and they had to agree to a ton of cleanup to get permits to build.

There are so many confounding factors that mean she could still have been poisoned by toxic industrial byproducts and the factor next door could still be innocent.

"Privacy watchdogs in Europe are considering a complaint against Apple made by a former employee, Ashley Gjøvik, who alleges the company fired her after she raised a number of concerns, internally and publicly, including over the safety of the workplace." "At the time, Gjøvik had been placed on administrative leave by Apple after raising concerns about sexism in the workplace, and a hostile and unsafe working environment which it had said it was investigating."

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/11/gobbler-complaint-europe/?...

But she's not the only resident and I haven't heard any indication of a class action.

I’m sure the area being so desperate for housing is part of why this was allowed. Adding 1800 housing units is a huge deal in a city that size.

Yeah, the reports quoted with scary big red boxes seem to be... mostly minor or procedural stuff?

In general, I find that people are hit or miss regarding their observations. Sometimes they are so on point that they seem like a savant, and sometimes they miss the mark so hard that I find believing anything further impossible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5G_misinformation#List_of_prot...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eyewitness_testimony

I feel the best type of public education would have been the listing of the many electromagnetic radiation sources we already have. Taking a sample person, say, from inner London, and enumerate just how many of the radiation gets to them already, from the 4G and previous sources, radio, the different equipment that a city has, and so on. I feel like people are missing the historical context is these cases, same with the COVID vaccine. We were already subject to many of the vaccines, and in many cases, the COVID vaccine wasn't anything different.

https://www.immunize.org/official-guidance/state-policies/re...

Also, they weren't doing chip fab there. It was R&D for Titan and MicroLED. There's a reason she's litigating her case against Apple pro se and without any expert witnesses and other lawyers. She's a basket case who went from almost fainting one time to now saying she almost died. She scared a lot of people at work who live in the same apartment building with this: https://sfbayview.com/2021/03/i-thought-i-was-dying-my-apart... We all bought equipment thinking we were being poisoned. TL;DR, we weren't. I was on the bottom floor and 0000000000 VOCs.

https://www.siliconvalley.com/2018/03/19/apple-secretly-deve... https://www.sfchronicle.com/tech/article/apple-tech-layoffs-...

If the source of the chemicals was actually the emissions from the other facility and not the soil below the building, you would expect none in the lower floors where you were and more on the higher floors where this person was.

None of the rest of us got sick, including the people who worked in that building and the one next to it (we have 2).

I'm not an environmental policy enforcer or scientist, but I can read from this report that the issue was mislabeled/unlabeled containers and haz waste treatment w/o EPA-required permit. None of that is going to make 1 single person in the entire area sick.

see: https://youtu.be/pGK4_sR1CvY?si=KEK9xh0mUEStV76-&t=2680

So no, it doesn't counter the hypochondria theory.

I live in the western hemisphere's largest integrated industrial complex (Freeport, TX integrated with the eastern edge of Houston as well). Note that Freeport, TX has ZERO state or federal EPA VOC analyzers which can actually detect which chemical is leaking. They can only detect "this amount of something with either {sulfur, N-O bonds, aromatic carbon rings} -- no clue what precisely though!". This is the same capability of the most advanced atmospheric pollution satellites. Completely fucking useless for an area which manufactures something like 15-20% of all USA domestic chemicals. The technology to measure individual chemicals exists, but the government isn't paying for it or installing it.

The ENTIRE east side of Houston metropolitan area is dedicated to or "next door" to massive chemical manufacturing. This is an industrial area nearly equal to the area encompassing all of Seattle+Bellevue+Redmond+Renton+Tukwila. That's not including nearby housing - that's just how big the manufacturing facilities themselves are! This massive area has only THREE air quality monitors which test for these kinds of chemicals[0]. During huge major events like the ITC fire[2], they typically show no increased pollution at all, which proves that it's woefully inadequate even during big emergencies that very obviously affect breathing air quality. I lived next to leaks every day and because I worked in the plants I knew the smells - one day acrylates, next day thiols, next day hydrocarbons, etc. But all 3 monitoring sites (over 10 miles from me) showed nothing at all.

Here is the one "correct" monitoring station near the chemical plants of Houston: [0]... but several of its analyzers are often offline/broken/pending maintenance. Here's a map of all the other ones: [1] Generally single/dual color dots mark "not-useful" monitoring sites which might measure only PM2.5 or Ozone, for example. The 4+ color dots are generally useful, they measure specific (large) families of chemicals so you can see very roughly what is leaking, even if it doesn't have "soot" in it.

The data used by ProPublica[3] is actually far worse than the woefully inadequate data collected by TCEQ/EPA air monitoring stations -- because what ProPublica used was "self-reported" data from the chemical plants. But I know from working in them and living next to them that many leaks are never reported and many leaks are never even known internally! Our government's data collection is a travesty. ProPublica couldn't use the real air quality measurements because having 2-3 points across 1000 mi^2 is completely useless for the wind models they wanted to apply to the problem. We don't actually have any data. The government is failing us.

ITC fire which blanketed houston's sky in smoke: [2]

: https://tceq.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id...

1: https://tceq.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id...

2: https://abc13.com/deer-park-fire-2019-itc-houston-air-qualit...

3: https://www.propublica.org/nerds/visualizing-toxic-air

This seems a bit high, closer to $100k installation cost for fairly basic real time regulatory monitors seems about right. CEMS (automated stack testing) monitors should be somewhat cheaper if the engineers didn't screw up the housing location on the stack/vent.

Otherwise, your prose very much matches my experience with air quality monitoring in Australia. It's an absolute mess and very much amateur hour compared to water monitoring or meteorology.

Like in this case, if they only wanted to test for fluorinated compounds. Testing for "Acetone, Acetonitrile, Acetaldehyde, Benzene, 1,2-Dichloroethane, Ethanol, Ethylbenzene, Hexane, Isopropanol, Isopropyl toluene, Methylene Chloride, Toluene, and Xylene." might be somewhere in the middle of $100k to $1M, depending on desired level of differentiation between similar chemicals.

From the linked post: "In September 2020, Gjovik hired an industrial hygienist to test the indoor air at her apartment. She purchased an inspection, soil testing, and a two-hour sorbent tube-based TO-17 air panel. Only half the total contaminants were accounted for in the test and the California EPA informed her that testing with Summa canisters for 24 hours is superior and would have yielded better results. Still, Gjovik’s limited testing returned results showing a number of the chemicals in use by Apple at ARIA including Acetone, Acetonitrile, Acetaldehyde, Benzene, 1,2-Dichloroethane, Ethanol, Ethylbenzene, Hexane, Isopropanol, Isopropyl toluene, Methylene Chloride, Toluene, and Xylene."

From the 2021 SF Bay View article: "I did try to do my own testing, but it was incredibly expensive and turned out to be insufficient. I wanted to get some formal data in the brief time before I moved out, so I hired an industrial hygienist to sample the indoor air and some of the topsoil. Despite the $1,555 I had to pay for it, the results were inconclusive. Apparently a different test – a “summa canister” – over a longer period of time would have been better. "

That doesn't align with how industrial air pollution works.

If someone else is wrong, the thing to do is either (1) respond with correct information and better arguments; or (2) let go and move on.

If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: your account has unfortunately been repeatedly posting comments with swipes in them. Examples:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40229264 (May 2024)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40224510 (May 2024)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38495066 (Dec 2023)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35970720 (May 2023)

That's one of the things the site guidelines specifically ask you not to do, so if you'd please not do any more of that, we'd appreciate it.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit more to heart, we'd be grateful. Note that this also includes "Don't be snarky.".

If someone else is wrong, you are of course welcome to respond with correct information and better arguments.

If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.

Edit: you crossed into personal attack in at least one other recent comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40643584) and we've also had to warn you about breaking the site guidelines in the past (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35105366). That's not cool, so please don't do this again.

You know the audience of this website. Why does Apple get this response from your highly educated tech audience?

Perhaps we have personal experience we cannot speak more openly about due to NDAs but would still like to let out a quip.

If you don't share relevant information, it may as well not exist. If you do share it, you should follow the site guidelines and edit out snark and swipes, so your substantive comment has a better chance of persuading the reader, and a lesser chance of provoking (f)lame responses from others.

> Why does Apple get this response from your highly educated tech audience?

It gets the entire spectrum of responses. You're noticing and assigning meaning to the responses you dislike, because that's what we all do: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....

> Perhaps we have personal experience we cannot speak more openly about due to NDAs but would still like to let out a quip.

It looks like you can speak openly enough about it to say more than just "Hello Apple Global Security", which is the run-of-the-mill internet stuff we're trying to avoid on this site. If that's what you mean by letting out a quip, please don't.

> If your comment is motivated by substantive personal experience, that's great, but then the thing to do is to share some of the information that your view is based on. You know it, but the rest of us don't.

I didn't know Ashley by name but after having watched her video last night from the Mastadon link on this thread, I now remember I had seen her earlier posts. Either way she comes off extremely legitimate, I spent at least an hour reviewing the things she posted yesterday. It is impressive if anything the data she has collected.

Calling her a hypochondriac like one of the GP replies did, trying to convince the reader to brush this whole thing away as someone who is squeeze money out of Apple. Some of the response on this thread is immediately recognizable by people who have gone through it themselves as Apple Global Security damage control.

Calling out the fact that she appears to have constantly changed her story makes her look untrustworthy. It could be a smear tactic by corporate enforcers, or it could be that she's genuinely untrustworthy!

I don't like Apple secrecy and after what they did during the wage survey, I don't trust anyone on the People team or in Security. But that doesn't make Ashley right or credible. She was a bully to other women in nearly every situation like everyone else in leadership. She baited us into confiding in her about our issues with management and the People team and then she ratted us out to the People team and we were all harassed into deciding whether or not we wanted a coerced investigation into our issues. What's worse is that Ashley convinced us that the People/Security teams were spying on us, when really it was her using us as some kind of leverage trying to squeeze them for money. She uses us still in her evidence in all her litigation against Apple. She never asked us for consent, she doesn't care. Just like when she worked with us, we were just things to be collected and used for her to get ahead.

On the other hand, it's entirely reasonable to assume that a large corporation would maximize its profits: it has a duty to. If the expected profits exceed the expected costs of breaking the law, guess what's going to happen. Probably the fairest outcome here is better enforcement mechanisms. Unfortunately, this outcome leaves both parties worse off in exchange for an improvement to society.

We’re not talking about some agile startup that rents the nearest place where they can assemble their hardware. This is one of the three most valuable companies in the world, essentially purchasing residential real estate to use as a venue for unsupervised high-tech manufacturing that flouts all environmental regulations they’d otherwise be subject to. And the reason is so that their highly paid employees can have a shorter commute to their R&D lab.

Personally, I’d prefer living next to a low vol semi lab to a whole myriad of other enterprises: petrochem, industrial scale chemistry, coal powerplants, GA airports using 100LL avgas, the list goes on. But hey, that’s just like my opinion man.

What the absolute @#$% is this??? Would I be wrong in assuming this should've made national news but was probably kept low thanks to Apple's deep pockets/connections?

And while it's not wrong that fluorine is a lethal gas, it is heavily used in many industries and in medicine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluorine#Inorganic_fluorides

Her documentation shows a careless attitude on Apple's side. And there are enough independent parties documenting accidents that she can sue and win. But overall, this doesn't look worse to me than how many other industrial companies operate.

The issue being, of course, the proximity of residential to a "light industrial" vs. "heavy industrial" plot sure changes things for the people moving into those residences...

I think the bigger untouched issue is this is already contaminated land. Unclear if it’s apple or the residential built on top of contamination.

These cleanups seem to almost never work well.

This looks strange indeed, I thought light industry is like bicycle repair and large bakeries, definitely wouldn’t expect a chemical plant

They make device screens: https://www.siliconvalley.com/2018/03/19/apple-secretly-deve...

She never faced to industrial chemical exposure, let alone 24/7. She didn't work in that building. She worked as a program manager for a software engineering team in an office building in Sunnyvale.

On a side note, Fluorine is bad stuff but I believe it doesn't have a long lifespan so any impact would be immediate or not at all

Factory workers working in dangerous conditions and losing their lives is unfortunate, but their effects hurting/killing the general population (a-la Bhopal Gas Tragedy) should not be legally possible.

One of the test samples he opened (unexpectedly) had a flourine compound in it that strips calcium from bones… he jumped in the lab shower which sets of an alarm when activated, which leads to lab evacuations and an emergency team in hazmat gear arriving

I've done some work with the public data from the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). OSHA does a great job of making detailed data on inspections and accidents public. If memory serves me correctly, it turns out there are about two deaths per day from work-related causes in the US...

It's a bit weird that most of discussion seems focused on the person sharing the report rather than it's contents.

Edit: OK, dang's comment sort of clears things up but the "thread consolidation" really results in some confusion.

That chemical court case seems very strong to me, with multiple indipendent parties having measured the gas in the air. (Edit: and multiple government agencies reporting chemical accidents at Apple) So it doesn't seem like she's trigger happy to sue, which would imply that there might also be merit in her other case.

Good thing Apple never had "don't be evil" as their slogan ;)

https://appleinsider.com/articles/22/04/05/appletoo-founders...

https://nypost.com/2022/04/03/apple-whistleblower-movement-t...

https://reason.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/ScarlettvGjovi...

Gjovik is self-publishing this for a reason, multiple journalists tried to corroborate her constantly changing story, and when the media interest disappeared she had a w̶e̶l̶l̶-̶p̶u̶b̶l̶i̶c̶i̶s̶e̶d̶ somewhat-infamous-in-Apple-circles meltdown and attacked multiple former allies for being out to get her, many of which have remained silent.

The rest of it was things being managed under state/local rules that should have been managed under federal rules which Apple still has time to fix and make them not violations.

I'll keep an open mind, but it seems strange that this lady was an Apple employee and happened to also be the victim.

Have other people been identified that suffered similarly to her? Where are their lawsuits? Or is there something special about her health condition, or her specific apartment unit, or something which means only she was susceptible to this?

And pay your fines to the government and move your fabs to remote areas so this doesn’t happen again.

There, problem solved. I’ve saved everyone millions of dollars in litigation fees, time, and now our judiciary system can tackle other problems.

https://mastodon.social/@ashleygjovik

Of course a big corp cannot give in easily to behaviour like that as it would just open the flood gates.

They prefer doing keeping their skunkworks small, and the easiest way to do that is to just install a charcoal filter and call it a day.

Edit: /s folks

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_negotiation_with_te...

Look at the chemical exposure Samsung treats their workers to. It happened in south Korea, but that's an other country, so it didn't matter. But it also happened in Canada, now it's news.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases...

That said, Santa Clara is basically a giant industrial superfund site already from the semiconductor industry, so I’m sure there are plenty of people being poisoned by the pollution in the area.

That doesn't make a good headline though.

You would go to the doctor and get some random incorrect advise. If you go online and check air quality you would not find anything obviously alarming. Maybe you decide you have asthma and move out of the city.

I personally had a condition with an obvious cause that took me 4 years to pinpoint and doctors were bloody useless.

If, hypothetically, I was being poisoned by some random industrial activity a mile away, I would never know

If there is an issue, it’s that these apartments were built (in ~2018). There are a number of other industrial sites nearby and the building was built in industrial zoning, after agreeing to numerous requirements to clean up the land to make it safe.

https://www.envirostor.dtsc.ca.gov/getfile?filename=/public%...

https://www.santaclaraca.gov/home/showdocument?id=17071

Nothing to see here, move along!

Imagine if you happen to be a neighbor and a disaster happens in the fab. That's just nuts.

What is it they saved here? Could they not fab this in a less populated area and just follow a few more regulations. We’re not talking about a company with razor thin margins. They spent outrageous amounts of money building the spaceship HQ.

I genuinely want to understand if this is stupidity or if there’s really a profit incentive that makes “fiduciary” sense.

The "vouch" link works like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#cvouch

Only Dan or a moderator would be able to see details about the accounts that flagged it.

The problem is really most of her examples seem like she is forcing the connection. Like her 3am dying spells and one of the times it happened her VOC measurements went up. It could very well be there is an issue with the plant exhaust but it could also be the land the apartment was built on or any number of issues with the new construction.

"Emergency Permit for Treatment of Hazardous Waste, Apple, Inc., Sunnyvale, California" https://ceqanet.opr.ca.gov/2022120706

… but it's for half a liter of some weird shit that seems to primarily be a fire hazard(?)

Note, I am not a lawyer or anyone who could professionally give an opinion on this.*

The most egregious violation the author purports Apple did is the illegal venting of hazardous chemicals.

IMHO, the most plausible evidence supporting the author's claim can be found in the (redacted) EPA report in observation #11.[1]

My understanding is that waste streams (hazardous materials being vented into the environment) must be accounted for in order to accurately calculate how often you must change carbon filters (called breakthrough time in the report) and that carbon filters lose efficacy as hazardous gasses are passed through it.

Anyways, the report found that Apple did not account for all the waste they were putting through the filters and thus could not accurately assess the "breakthrough time" of the filters. There is a plausible case that could be made that a filter had reached its "breakthrough time" -- potentially leaking hazardous gases into the environment. This reportedly has been occurring since atleast* Dec 2020, which could be around the time the author moved in which was also 2020 (unspecified range).

1. https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/312oqvretg7yyhfx0ohx4/AGZduVX...

1. Apple doesn't do chip fab at Scott Blvd. They did R&D for Titan and microLED screens and were part of the layoffs in April.

2. The EPA says that they didn't have permits WITH THE EPA, but were permitted with California and Santa Clara County/City.

3. She says the carbon filters weren't changed, not the EPA.

4. She says Apple said materials weren't hazardous waste, but the report says they were labeled "California Waste", meaning they weren't properly reporting the materials to the EPA, but were to the state of California.

5. How is it this woman was nearly killed, while the employees who WORK in the building are perfectly healthy, the next door businesses have no sick employees, and the other thousands of residents in the apartment building are also not sick?

6. Why isn't the news covering this? Why aren't they shut down?

None of this makes any sense and looking at her lawsuit, she seems like she needs to serious mental help.

> How is it this woman was nearly killed, while the employees who WORK in the building are perfectly healthy

This is quite ignorant of how this actually works. How is it possible that Union carbide plant in Bhopal killed 16,000 people in one day but most employees were perfectly healthy?

> the next door businesses have no sick employees other thousands of residents in the apartment building are also not sick?

You are obviously wrong, have you ever tried going around your neighbourhood and asking people: "hey, there has been consistent release of dangerous chemicals, is anyone sick?". That's a population of thousands of people, dozens of people will have bronchitis, asthma, inflammation, cancer, god knows what. How do you know if it is related to the chemical pollution?

Perhaps dozens of people have felt symptoms and went to the doctor, and maybe they were diagnosed with Asthma or allergies or some other erroneous disease. Maybe they moved to the countryside by now, believing themselves to be ill.

Unless someone knocks on the door, polls the residents, takes blood samples and tests them at an independent lab, conducts statistical analysis of all the medical records, etc. you have no moral right to assert this.

However, what we can assess is the ex-employee's actions and multitude of claims, which while in isolation seems benign, together makes her look more like a vengeful ex-employee than a credible victim

Perfectly healthy? I doubt that. There were several casualties at least ans probably many more with long term problems.

> She says the carbon filters weren't changed, not the EPA.

I'm going by what the EPA says and not what she says.

> How is it this woman was nearly killed, while the employees who WORK in the building are perfectly healthy, the next door businesses have no sick employees, and the other thousands of residents in the apartment building are also not sick?

I don't know. It's a matter worth investigating. Also, it's perfectly consistent for people inside the building to be fine whilst working inside considering the toxic fumes are vented outside the building and aren't just circulating inside it.

> Why isn't the news covering this? Why aren't they shut down?

This is out of my wheelhouse. I'm guessing government agencies are bit more reticent with regards to shutting down businesses unless there is a readily apparent danger to public health (i.e. something that could hold up to scrutiny in court).

I don't think that any of this is as serious as even you are making it out to be, though I understand I misunderstood the carbon boxes thing.

At the risk of sounding snarky, but it seems like you have a recurring pattern of just not reading what I've typed. First you've misunderstood the carbon filter and now. It's like I say X and you've heard Y and Z.

Do you also believe that Apple has broken into her homes across three states, follows her in unmarked vehicles, threatened to mail her a severed head, intercepted her home internet, and bugged her apartment, too?

Or is bringing up her own dubious allegations against this company off-limits when she's analyzing an EPA report without any qualifications?

Fact of the matter is, EPA reported that Apple was under accounting their waste streams leaving open the possibility that filters were not changed as often as they should have been.

I didn't see anywhere that they weren't changing the filters enough, only Ashley said she figured that out from public records requests. I don't trust her to understand anything she reads.

She has confused everyone at work into thinking we're breathing/drinking toxins more than once.

I don't think you've read observation #11 or my comment.

From observation #11:

> Apple does not appear to have included all the solvent waste streams when calculating the breakthrough times for the "Activated Carbon" boxes to ensure no VOCs are released into the atmosphere onsite.

Breakthrough times are a function of how much VOCs you are putting through them. If you under account for the amount of VOCs you will overestimate the "true" breakthrough time.