Apple coughs up millions for technicians who shared explicit photos and a video of a 21-year-old iPhone owner
According to The Telegraph, Apple has agreed to pay millions of US dollars in damages to a woman after technicians working on behalf of the company shared explicit photos and a video of her while repairing her iPhone. Court documents confirm that the incident happened at a Pegatron-run centre based in California in 2016. Pegatron and its insurers have agreed to cover Apple's costs.
The Telegraph writes that two technicians 'posted 10 photos of her in various stages of undress and a sex video from her Facebook account', making it seem as though she had uploaded them. Apparently, the woman only removed the photos and video after friends informed her that they were on her profile.
Neither Apple nor the court has disclosed the settlement's size, although documents describe it as being 'multimillion-dollar'. It is worth stressing that Apple wanted to keep details of the settlement private to prevent it from suffering irreparable harm and 'substantial business harm'. Accordingly, the company prevented many of the incident's details from being published and was initially referred to as a 'customer' in court documents. A separate lawsuit confirmed that Apple was the customer in the incident-concerned, though.
An Apple spokesperson, cited by The Telegraph, stated that:
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.
Source(s)
The Telegraph UK, James Lewis - Image credit
