Apple paid millions to a student whose nudes were posted to Facebook

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Apple has paid a settlement to a 21-year-old student after her privacy was invaded during a repair of her iPhone in 2016. The student dropped her phone off to be repaired and technicians went through her phone and even posted explicit images and videos to her Facebook account.

In 2016, an Oregon student sent her iPhone to Apple to be repaired. While it was there, employees at the repair facility dug through her phone and found “10 photos of her in various stages of undress and a sex video.” And as if that wasn’t disgusting enough, the employees then posted the photos to the student’s Facebook page. She wasn’t even made aware until her friends stumbled on the photos and let her know.

The incident happened five years ago in Sacramento, California. According to The Telegraph, the incident happened at a repair shop run by a third-party contractor, Pegatron. According to the article mentioned above, this is the worst privacy violation in the history of Apple.

Apple has always been a big proponent for its customers’ privacy and safety, so it’s clear that something like this happening at a third-party site could piss them off a bit. A spokesperson for the company had this to say about the incident.

“We take the privacy and security of our customers’ data extremely seriously and have a number of protocols in place to ensure data is protected throughout the repair process.  When we learned of this egregious violation of our policies at one of our vendors in 2016, we took immediate action and have since continued to strengthen our vendor protocols.”

This is something that Apple has been working hard to try and avoid. The company has long warned about the dangers of granting third-party companies access to Apple customers’ phones. Apple claims that allowing more third-party repair shops is dangerous, and this case proves that to an extent.

This incident was settled outside of court and no actual payout was disclosed, though lawyers were asking for $5 million. Hopefully, this will be a wake-up call for Apple and other companies to crack down even more on third-party contractors.

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