Creep Factor: Apple Conducts Residential Search For Missing iPhone

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Imagine this: There is a suspicion that you are in possession of stolen property (hypothetically, of course). Police want to come search your house, your car, and your office. Wanting to clear your name, you say "sure"!

But how would you feel if the owner of the stolen property joined the police in their search of your home, car, and office? If someone stole your laptop or collectible baseball card collection, would you expect the police to allow you to help search the private homes, etc. of their top suspects?

Apparantly, Apple gets this kind of VIP treatment from the San Francisco Police Department.

Last week, I told you that Apple did it again. Somehow an Apple insider managed to lose a super secret iPhone prototype at a San Francisco bar. This happened once before about 18 months ago at another San Francisco Bay Area bar just before the release of the iPhone 4. Crazy, eh? This time, what is believed to be an iPhone 5 prototype (there's unofficial word the real thing will come out next month) was reportedly found and sold on Craig's List for $200. Apple reportedly traced the missing phone via GPS signal to a San Francisco residential address and tipped off the police.

Here's where it gets creepy. It has since come to light, confirmed by the San Francsico Police Department, that Apple executives were allowed to go with police officers to the home in question and participate in the search of a private residence.

The man who lives at the house, 22-year-old Sergio Calderon, claims he did not understand at the time that the plain clothes people who he allowed to search his house were Apple employees and that if he had it to do again, he would have said "no". The Apple employees apparently searched his home, car, and computer. No missing iPhone was found, and no complaint was filed by Apple.

So what do you think? Do you think Apple overstepped? Is this the same company that positioned itself as the anti-Big Brother company back in 1984?

One other note: Apple posted a couple of jobs last week (not making this up) for new product security managers. You can read the job description yourself. For starters, here's the first requirement; "The candidate will be responsible for overseeing the protection of, and managing risks to, Apple’s unreleased products and related intellectual property".

For this job, Advil will be tax write-off, I'm guessing.

Renee Oricchio is a technology writer and former supervising news producer for CNN Financial News. She has been covering the computer industry since 1987. @oricchio