Apple settled a case with a 21-year-old college student after sending her iPhone to a repair facility in 2016 only to find that employees had uploaded personal explicit images and videos to her Facebook account from the phone during the repair process .
The student had sent her iPhone to Apple for repair. The privacy breach ultimately took place at a repair facility in California operated by Pegatron, an Apple contractor. The telegraph reports that Apple paid millions in settlement compensation.
Apple is proud of its commitments to privacy and data security. Unfortunately, in this case, these priorities were not met in the facilities of his contractor.
About 10 images and videos from his personal photo library on the device were shared online by repair technicians. The lawsuit sued Apple for invasion of privacy and emotional suffering. The employees involved were dismissed.
While it was being fixed, the two technicians posted “10 photos of her in various stages of undressing and a sex video” from her Facebook account, in a way that suggested that she had downloaded them herself. The images were only deleted after friends informed her that they had been posted.
In a statement to The telegraph, Apple said “when we learned of this blatant violation of our policies at one of our vendors in 2016, we took immediate action and have since continued to strengthen our vendor protocols.”
One of the issues here is that Apple is asking customers to send their iPhone with the password disabled, which allows anyone in the channel to access all of the data stored on the device. However, it is always advisable to also reset your device to factory settings before sending it in for repair.
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