I wonder which employees they have host and attend these events. Does Apple hire a bunch of police-type psychos? Do they find the most pro-cop software developers at the company? Do they make the actual people developing the software do it?
The article says
The timing of the story comes one year after the last Global Police Summit, and according to the report, the Apple employee who led the efforts—Gary Oldham—recently left the company.
The details around his exit are unknown. Notably though, there was no Global Police Summit held this year. It’s unclear whether the event will return without Oldham at the helm.
I’m pretty sure you can count the number of techbros morally opposed to hosting a police summit on one hand
seems pretty likely he didn't think apple were bootlicking hard enough and quit, considering:
In July 2024, Oldham told police customers that he’d not been able to secure budget for the 2024 Global Police Summit, but hoped it would become a biennial event. A week later, he emailed Californian police departments again to say he was leaving the company, without providing a reason why.t
and I doubt they're sending software developers to this sort of thing, more like marketing/communications people I feel like, but you'd be surprised how pro cop many techies are tbh. Especially on the older end, these are the same people who wrote the software for guided missiles and license plate readers and shit, they don't see the problem. Even the more liberal among them, if they've thought it through, may not like police aesthetically but probably believe they need to exist more or less as they are
For profit company in capitalist country tries to sell products to different markets including the lavishly funded police state. It does this obviously by highlighting how such products can be used by that particular segment and wining and dining them at conferences with free swag to influence those who hold the purse-strings.
People here for some reason:
This is almost certainly no different than Apple hosting a little thing at a store showing people "hacks" like replacing an alarm clock with the clock app. It's just marketing and with how well the police are funded it makes sense. I mean they're foolish enough to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on Musk's Bazinga-mobile for "outreach" so obviously Apple wants some cash from selling cops half-baked solutions using their products that may not even be as good as purpose-built solutions currently on the market and theoretically might take away business from cop-specific businesses.
I can't say critical support or anything but it's nothing to get worked up about.
I mean I'm not sure what people expect? For Tim Apple to say fuck the police? Apple is one of the most valuable companies in the world.
Not to excuse many awful things they do but from a privacy perspective, Google is in much, much, much deeper with the intelligence, police, surveillance state. They own at least one company in "isreal" founded and run by zionist intelligence officers. They regularly collaborate with the zionists and the US military on multiple projects including building purpose-made equipment specifically for them and hold conferences so regular it's not even of note. And Microsoft... they've been in bed with the feds for decades and do great things like automatically back up Windows encryption key to the Microsoft cloud where it can be subject to warrants by default. Apple at least on a surface level seems to do more, even if it's just for its image and marketing.
