Apple (AAPL) Using Confidentiality Agreements To Keep iPod Problems Secret

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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appleThere is no end to the lengths to which Apple will go to keep overheating problems with its iPod under wraps.

The Times reports that“Apple attempted to silence a father and daughter with a gagging order after the child’s iPod music player exploded and the family sought a refund from the company.”

Apple has been accused of trying to hide problems with the iPod and recently the Consumer Product Safety Commission released 800 pages of documentation about problems with the device.

The latest incident of Apple trying to keep trouble with the media player silent happened in the UK.  The family in question contacted the huge hardware company and talked to a number of people only to find out that they could get a refund for the iPod in exchange for signing a confidentiality agreement.

The issue of iPod malfuncitons seem to be growing. Each time Apple tries to silence one party that has had trouble with the device, another pops up. The company certainly has to be concerned about a recall, which would be costly both in terms of direct expenditures to repair or replace machines and indirectly in terms of what it would do to Apple’s image.

And, at Apple, image is a very big part of the reason the company has done as well as it has.

Douglas A. McIntyre

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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