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For the National Whistleblower Center’s National Whistleblower Day celebration, which Whistleblower Network News (WNN) co-sponsored, WNN had the pleasure of interviewing Thomas le Bonniec.
In 2019, le Bonniec worked in Ireland for a subcontractor employed by Apple. When he first started the job, he was enthusiastic about the location and good pay, but he quickly took issue with what the job entailed: listening to user recordings from Siri, Apple’s virtual assistant.
“I disagreed from the first day with what I was supposed to do at my job,” le Bonniec says during the interview. He stayed at the job for two months, but when he listened to a recording from a pedophile, he decided he couldn’t stay on any longer. That was also the moment le Bonniec decided that the public needed to know what was going on.
Since leaving Apple, le Bonniec has been urging the data protection authorities in Europe to take action about his allegations, “because they are responsible for these kinds of violations. They are the ones who should investigate that.” During the interview, he talked about his whistleblowing experience and how he tried to flag the recording to no avail. He also talked about how he was unable to blow the whistle on these issues internally, because it was the job itself that is extremely objectionable. “These recordings were made on a massive scale,” le Bonniec emphasizes.
