Apple Gets to Decide What You're Allowed to Read on a Public Court Docket

Case update: Gjovik v. Apple Inc., N.D. Cal. No. 3:23-cv-04597-EMC; Ninth Circuit appeals pending. Everything discussed below comes from the public docket, which you can read for yourself on CourtListener. The views here are mine — I'm the plaintiff, and these are some of the arguments I am making on appeal.
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The district court case ended with a judgment on June 24, 2026 (Dkt. 390), which is now on appeal to the Ninth Circuit. But a second dispute — about secrecy itself — kept going after the judgment, and it has now produced its own appeal (Ninth Circuit No. 26-5331). That dispute is about whether hundreds of pages of my court filings, largely describing my complaints about my working conditions at Apple, can be sealed from public view, and whether I can be ordered to "de-publish" my own speech about my own case.

Here's the short version of how we got here, all from the public docket:

• In early 2026, Apple moved to seal roughly twenty of the filings in the case — including oppositions, declarations, and even a Request for Judicial Notice consisting of public records (Dkt. 340). The documents were sealed in their entirety, provisionally, in April (Dkt. 355).
• After the case was already over, a magistrate judge granted Apple's motion to keep its confidentiality designations (Dkt. 396, June 29, 2026). That order also directed that the previously sealed filings "remain sealed," and ordered me to "de-publish" material.
• The order's entire description of what is actually confidential is a single category: my deposition testimony about Apple's "internal code words and descriptions of internal product-related studies." (Dkt. 396 at 6.) It does not identify which portions of which documents contain that information.
• The district judge declined to disturb that ruling (Dkt. 398, July 16, 2026) — but, notably, ordered the parties to meet and confer about applying "limited redactions" to the sealed filings, because even Apple had told the court that entire documents should not stay sealed.
• I appealed. Twice, protectively, to make sure nothing slipped through a procedural crack (Dkt. 399, Dkt. 403).

So as of today the filings remain 100% sealed, months after a court acknowledged only "limited redactions" were warranted, and the question of what the public gets to see is being worked out — if you can call it that — in a "meet and confer" process between me and the company that wanted the secrecy in the first place.

Follow the sequence, because each step is stranger than the last.

Step one: seal first, specify never. Sealing a court record is supposed to work in exactly one order of operations. The party who wants secrecy identifies the specific content, explains with particularity why each piece meets the demanding legal standard, and the court makes specific findings before anything is sealed. That's not my preference — it's the Ninth Circuit's rule and this district's own Local Rule 79-5, which requires sealing requests to be "narrowly tailored" to sealable material, identified item by item. Here, entire documents were sealed wholesale, and the operative order defines the confidential content only as a one-sentence category.

Step two: the company that demanded secrecy can't find it. When the court ordered the "limited redactions" process, Apple — the party that filed the sealing motions, supported by sworn declarations — reported that it needed weeks to conduct a "careful and diligent review of nearly 1,000 pages" to locate the confidential information. Sit with that. The confidential content that justified sealing a thousand pages was, by Apple's own account, so hard to find that Apple itself needed a month-long expedition to locate it — months after it swore the documents warranted sealing.

Step three: the redactions arrive with no explanations. What Apple eventually produced was a set of highlighted pages. No index. No indication of which highlights quote the designated testimony and which are "indirect references" (Apple's phrase). No explanation of how any particular highlight falls within the one-sentence category. When I asked for a per-redaction basis — the kind of itemized chart this district ordinarily requires for any sealing request — Apple refused, and told me the burden was on me to identify each redaction I disputed and justify my disagreement, after which, in Apple's own words, "Apple will then consider your response before making a final decision about whether to retain or remove the redaction."

Read that again. In a dispute about the public's right of access to court records, the party seeking secrecy has appointed itself the final decision-maker.

Step four: no court will say who decides. Meanwhile, the jurisdictional picture is a hall of mirrors. Apple's position, filed publicly (Dkt. 406), is that the district court retains jurisdiction to "supervise" the filing of redacted versions — but cannot actually adjudicate anything about the redactions, because the orders are on appeal. The district court's latest order (Dkt. 407) sets a deadline for the meet and confer and says disagreements should go to the magistrate judge — while noting that whether the magistrate or the district judge would even have jurisdiction over such a dispute "may turn on the specifics of the issue." So: the redactions must be worked out now; the court that issued the orders won't construe them; the party that benefits from secrecy claims final decision authority; and the question of which judge could review any of it is expressly unresolved.

The result is a system with no adult in the room — except the one with the trillion-dollar market cap. My position, stated to Apple in writing, is simple: I am not the arbiter of Apple's redactions and I will not pretend to be. The burden of justifying secrecy belongs to Apple at every stage. Apple can file whatever redacted versions it believes it can justify, those choices will be Apple's alone, and the Ninth Circuit can review what this process actually produced.

The appeal isn't about hurt feelings over process. The orders are wrong under multiple independent bodies of law, any one of which requires reversal.

The public-access doctrine. Court records are the public's records. Under Kamakana v. City & County of Honolulu, 447 F.3d 1172 (9th Cir. 2006), sealing anything more than tangentially related to the merits requires "compelling reasons supported by specific factual findings" — and conclusory assertions of harm don't count. Foltz v. State Farm, 331 F.3d 1122 (9th Cir. 2003), requires a particularized showing as to specific documents; blanket designations under a stipulated protective order prove nothing. An order that seals a thousand pages in their entirety on the strength of a one-sentence category, with no document-specific findings, inverts every element of this doctrine. The months-long fight over what the order even covers is itself the proof: an order that complied with Kamakana would have answered that question on its face.

Improper delegation of a judicial function. Deciding what the public may see in a court file is a judicial act requiring judicial findings. What has happened here instead is that the court issued a category and left the interested corporate party to determine, unilaterally and after the fact, what the order sealed — with Apple declaring in writing that it will make the "final decision" on each redaction. Whatever else that is, it is not an Article III court administering the public's right of access. The redacted documents that eventually appear on the docket will have been scoped entirely by the party that sought the secrecy, with no judicial review of a single specific redaction. That structural defect infects every redaction regardless of its content.

Prior restraint. The order doesn't just seal documents — it commands me to "de-publish" material I already published about my own case. An injunction forbidding and unwinding speech is a prior restraint, which comes to any court "bearing a heavy presumption against its constitutional validity." Prior restraints are the most disfavored remedy in American law, tolerated only in the most extraordinary circumstances, on the most specific findings. There are no such findings here — there couldn't be, when the order doesn't even specify what content it reaches.

Labor law. The sealed filings are, at their core, an employee's complaints about her working conditions and her employer's conduct — the heartland of activity protected by Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act. And California has spoken directly to this: the Silenced No More Act (Code of Civil Procedure § 1001; Government Code § 12964.5) embodies the state's explicit public policy against instruments that restrict workers from discussing unlawful workplace conduct. Orders that operate to gag an employee-plaintiff's accounts of her workplace disputes sit in direct tension with both federal labor law and California's declared policy — a tension the orders never acknowledge, let alone resolve.

Public records cannot be secret. Among the sealed filings is a Request for Judicial Notice composed of public records. Information already in the public domain cannot satisfy any sealing standard, under any test, in any circuit. That entire documents of this character have now spent months under seal tells you everything about how much scrutiny the sealing requests actually received.
What happens nextOn my side: the district-court process is complete. I initiated the court-ordered meet and confer, pursued it for over a month, proposed a concrete protocol with deadlines, and asked Apple to state the basis for its redactions. Apple declined. I have stated my final position and reserved everything for appeal. Apple will file its redacted versions; whatever it chooses to black out, it chose alone.

Then it goes to the Ninth Circuit, where the opening brief in the sealing appeal is due this fall, and where the questions finally get asked in the right order: What, specifically, was found to be sealable? By whom? On what evidence? And who gave a litigant the power to decide what the public may read in a public court file?

I'll post the briefs when they're filed. The full docket, including every order discussed above, is public on CourtListener.

— Ashley M. Gjøvik