“In the wake of the celeb hacking scandal, Eva Longoria has claimed her own privacy was breached by more than one Apple employee in Texas,” Access Hollywood reports.
“Longoria sat down with Billy Bush and Kit Hoover for Access Hollywood Live and as the leaked photo scandal came up, she disclosed that an employee at an Apple store admitted to taking her information and actually contacted her,” Access Hollywood reports. “‘Wait, what were they sending you? Like, ‘Hi Eva, my name is John?” Hoover asked.”
Access Hollywood reports, “‘Yeah. ‘I made a dress I want to send it to you, I work at the Apple Store here in San Antonio’ and I’m like… what? Did someone give out my email? Or my phone! ‘I saw your phone number from your profile, I just wanted to call and say hi I’m a fan.’ …There are a lot of privacy issues,’ Longoria said.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: If true, that’s obviously a fireable offense.
Why is this even a story???
This is not Apple’s fault, just like it wouldn’t be Facebook’s fault if one of their employees looked up a celebrity profile and contacted them. It is the employees fault. As MDN said, if this is true, the employee should be terminated. I am fairly confident these large corporations include in their training materials that it is never okay to look up contact information or contact customers for any reason unless it’s related to a request the customer has explicitly made.
It is Apple’s fault if Apple does not restrict access to user’s account information. All account access should be logged and be allowed with a valid support ticket.
Apple needs to tighten security procedures more than anyone else is willing to do.
Ivy needs to put some thoughts into innovating in the security of users data and media.
Apple is the employer you idiot. They apparently need to do more training. The employee is an extension of the company.
You can train all you want, but you can’t train away stupidity. Saying there is an amount of employee training and protocols that can be put into place that would completely stop this type of thing is as stupid as saying there are enough gun restrictions and free counseling available to prevent people from going on murderous rampages. Idiots are doing to do whatever idiots want regardless of the systems put in place to stop them. Apple is only at fault for hiring the dumbass in the first place. Fire him (if this story is true) and move on. Nothing to see here.
Yes there is always the possibility of rogue or stupid employees, but that doesn’t relieve corporate Apple of legal and practical responsibility for what its hired representatives do with internally deployed systems and information.
And being responsible doesn’t mean you can guarantee perfection. That is a false dichotomy. Nobody is saying Apple has to be the only corporation on the planet without glitches.
Yes, Apple is responsible for what their agent did with data entrusted to them. The employee violated Apple’s privacy terms. He deserves firing with prejudice. Apple could be on the hook for financial damages for the violation. . . not much, but some. The one violated must show an economic loss, such as expenses to change her email and notify friends and business relationships of the new address. These may or may not be trivial.
If the corporations on Wall Street weren’t responsible for destroying the lives of millions of americans, bankrupting thousands of americans, and making thousands of americans homeless as a direct result of their corporate policy, then I don’t see what responsibility Apple has here from a rogue employee.
Obviously the employee is mostly to blame and should be fired if the story is true, but Apple is also at fault as it is the corporation responsible for managing their customers information and protecting all customers (famous or not) from misuse of their information.
Actually, a company is responsible for the actions of its employees, while they are on the clock, even if the actions in question have nothing to do with the employees’ job. So if “John” stole her info during the work day (seems most likely), Apple can get hit with that. Or, let’s say, John saw the info left on a coworker desk at home, John is off the clock, but who ever removed the info from the Apple store must have been at work to do it, so Apple gets hit again.
There is a HUGE difference between someone being “responsible” and someone being “at fault”. They are not the same thing. A factory worker on the clock might decide to kill a fellow employee because his wife had an affair at home. While the factory might be “responsible” for the death of the co-worker, the it is certainly not the factories fault that this happened. Same with Apple. Apple may have responsibility, but as I said originally, it’s not Apples fault this happened.
If a hospital employee takes your personal information and publishes your medical history to the world, then the hospital security and privacy protection is at fault.
The hospital is responsible for the breach. But it is not the corporate HQ’s fault that it happened.
Maybe they did not prostate themselves in her presence. That would mean being fired and 20 lashes.
A public flogging in city square.
I agree 100% with MDN’s take.
Umm … I think @ramiuseng meant “prostrate themselves” not “prostate.” That has a quite different meaning.
I’m not even sure how you would do that…and I’ve got one. :O
More than fired, if true the employee should be prosecuted by the full weight of the law.
But remember there’s also a lot of BS being thrown at Apple and it’s very easy to impersonate an employee over the phone.
Agreed on the first part, good point on the second part.
Obviously, this is a propaganda, all the incidents happened at once just to hammer the stocks down.
Apple employees should be restricted from looking up personal info on anyone. Why would they need to do that unless they were contacted first?
The employee did not look up the info. He or she got it at the time Eva came in for service. Any service requires contact info so once the service is complete they are notified to pickup there device. Apple strictly forbids contact for anything else period. The training is out there long ago about this kind of thing no matter who they are.
The world’s working up a nice hair trigger, isn’t it?
So she purchased something at the Apple Retail Store and was asked for her phone number along with other information. What does she think this is for? Some stupid Apple employees, who have full right to see the number for Apple business purposes, used it for personal business which as said, is a fireable offense at best. Did she complain to anyone beside the media when it could get her attention?
Maybe she just wants attention.
That’s a big no, no! More than likely that Apple employee will be no longer.
Banish him/ her to a third world country.
This could be a phishing and/or social engineering scam to pry more information out of Eva.
Phishing and social engineering are still the most effective ways of hacking.
What’s a better ruse to get iCloud credentials than pretending to be an Apple Store employee?
She is just trying for more PR exposure. She was and is getting stale.
Never mind all that. I want to see the dress.
As “fireable” an offense as this is, I can’t help but wonder, if Longoria had perhaps overreacted just a bit? I know there are many stalkers, wackos and deranged people out there, who are obsessed with their favourite Hollywood personalities, but among those, there are many, many more ordinary, normal people, and there is a strong possibility that this was an ordinary person who just thought that contacting a customer about something that is not business-related can’t be all that harmful. I have no doubt many Apple Geniuses end up with their customers’ phone numbers in their private address books (it has been said that for many young women, the Genius Bar at the Soho store in NYC is a great place to find cute young guys). I wouldn’t be surprised if this guy has had a similar scenario in the past (calling a cute girl that came into the store and asking her out). As I said, it may be a “fireable” offense, but more often than not, it is completely innocent.
People who work in retail on Rodeo Drive (and in the general area) know very well not to do this — they are exposed to celebrities quite often. This happened in Texas, though, so the guy was likely starstruck…
One of my Apple eMail addresses is right there on the screen when I buy stuff at the Apple Store! Thankfully, I’m not famous.
That’s not a “privacy issue!” That’s a moronic employee and I assure you his career with Apple has ended.
I work for a bank and for any famous customers that we do have, their phone numbers would be available for any employee to see with a simple search of the bank’s internal system. And of course if any employee used that to contact someone famous as in the example with Eva Longoria, they would be fired for misusing company systems. The same is true for most companies, she’s just simply looking for some cheap publicity out of this is all.
i would not believe anything to come out of that woman’s mouth, you don’t know where it’s been.
Health records have a higher degree of security, in which they can identify which employees looked at a file (e.g. the Britney Spears case at UCLA hospital in 2008). On the other hand, I had a friend who worked at a well known rental car company, and he could type in a famous persons name and tell you their Drivers License info, their phone number, etc. He joked about how celebrities would lie about their age on TV, but the drivers license didn’t lie. He said some celebrities would send their personal assistants to rent cars, because they didn’t want their own information on the contract . . . my point: if you are expecting “privacy” from transactions with corporations, their systems may not be as secure as you might expect.
So, did she file a complaint to the management? Or does she feel left out because nobody hacked her iPhoto library?