Customer: Apple Store denied me iPad for speaking Farsi

[homasse]

Customer: Apple Store denied me iPad for speaking Farsi

An Alpharetta woman and one of her friends say the Apple Store turned them away after they heard them speaking Farsi.

One was trying to buy an iPad, the other an iPhone. When they were heard speaking the foreign language, they said the sales representative refused to sell them anything.

Comments

[kaelstra]

That is definitely some profiling going on there. Just because someone may be Iranian doesn't mean the phones/iPads are actually going there.

[felicitea]

Yeah, I mean that's quite obviously not on. Guy should lose his job, you can't say shit like that to customers.

[layweed]

Why should the guy lose his job if it's Apple corporate policy not to sell its products to Iranians? He's just following what the company told him not to do.

[felicitea]

I was under the impression that the policy isn't not to sell to Iranians, it's not to sell for export to Iran, and the store has just taken it upon itself to deny her service.

If that's not the case, I recant that bit.

"A representative for the U.S. State Department told Viteri it is illegal to travel to Iran with laptops or satellite cellphones without U.S. authorization.

That representative said she is not familiar with Apple enforcing that law."

[layweed]

I agree that it was pretty insensitive to say it the way the guy did, maybe they could ship him off to customer relations training or something.

The Apple policy is vague about personal purchases and sounds like it's more for major export than personal purchases.

http://www.apple.com/legal/export.html

[devour_theflesh]

Completely ridiculous..

[mirhanda]

Isn't there some law that makes it illegal to export certain tech to certain places? I have a fuzzy memory of something like that.

[vvalkyri]

yes.

No time to read the links, but bing results 'technological export law' might be a start.

[vvalkyri]

found it. http://www.apple.com/legal/export.html

What it looks like to me is that Apple mostly figures that people buying stuff in the US aren't going to be an issue and do not make a policy of asking.

But once the employee thought that that yes, this tech was going to travel back to Iran, they would be breaking US law to make the sale with that knowledge.

The sticky part here is that the guy on visa from Iran hadn't said anything about returning, and the gal planning to give an iPad to her cousin in Iran hadn't said anything about doing so.

[louisadkins]

I remember running in to this when I worked Tech Support for Dell computers. In training, we were told that if we thought someone calling was calling from a banned country or that they were repairing the computer(s) to ship to a banned country that we had to (if i recall correctly) record the call, get certain details, deny them service, and report the incident to the federal authorities. They mentioned that enforcement was very serious, and that even if we were unsure that we should err on the side of caution; apparently (at least at that time) they were very trigger happy on fining/prosecuting companies. This whole thing does not surprise me, at all.

[leaf_kunoichi]

If Apple really cared, they wouldn't have told them to buy it online, they would have retrained the employees so it could be purchased in the store. 'Buy it online' is a cop-out.

[vvalkyri]

http://ontd-political.livejournal.com/9797365.html?thread=597824501#t597824501

My interpretation is along the lines of "if you buy it on line it's easier for us not to ask questions" - US policy does indeed prohibit certain technology being exported to Iran.