Jeff Platt for Bakerfield Now:
A Bakersfield woman is outraged with the Valley Plaza Mall Apple Store, after an employee stole photos off her phone.
The original Facebook post the woman put up has been shared over a thousand times and now there are investigations.
Fuentes said a male employee took the phone and later gave it back. When Fuentes got home she was petrified, someone sent a text from her phone to a number she didn’t recognize. The contents of the text; a single “personal” photo. Fuentes’ wrote on Facebook, “And this picture was from almost a year ago so he had to have scrolled up for a while.”
While the employee has been fired, this case isn’t over.
According the Bakersfield Police Department, there is an open, active investigation. So criminal charges may be on the table.
MacDailyNews Take: It’s actually kind of surprising that this sort of privacy invasion doesn’t happen more often. Apple Retail Store employees are generally a good bunch, but there is inevitably always one bad apple (pun intended).
If found guilty, prosecute him to the fullest extent of the law.
If the Apple employee had sent the photo to himself using Air Drop, then the customer would never have found out. Or he could have just deleted the message from her iMessage history.
Yeah, sending by Airdrop, the client would never have known. The fired employee probably thought that pulling his own phone out to receive the Airdrop (I don’t believe you can auto-receive from a different AppleID) would be hella suspicious.
Deleting the message would also have worked. This was clearly not the sharpest tool in the shed, though.
Hopefully Apple themselves will bring charges against this a-hole, for damage to their reputation or what not.
** That we know of. **
As Bryan Blumberg notes, employees could simply delete iMessage (though there’d still be sent message visible on other devices with that AppleID, if iCloud message sync isn’t enabled).
Or, if client had to actually leave the phone with Apple, employees could easily Airdrop it to their own phones once it’s taken to the back of the store and out of sight, and there’d be no log of that anywhere.
Apple Genius Bar employees never ask for your password, They hand you your device for you to self enter. Immediately, that should have been a BIG RED FLAG!
There are times when they do need your password and it is not practical for you to enter it yourself. Mainly when servicing a Mac maybe. But they always ask if it is okay for you to give it. You would think with all this emphasis on privacy that Apple’s own employees would know better and be on board with what their employer is trying to do.
“ (though there’d still be sent message visible on other devices with that AppleID, if iCloud message sync isn’t enabled)”
How would it show up on other devices if sync isn’t enabled???
Think before you post.
Reading comprehension + Think before you post, yourself.
Any text or iMessage I send/receive on my phone is DUPLICATED on my Mac and iPad, and vice versa. But because “Enable Messages in iCloud” isn’t enabled on my devices, if I delete a message from my phone, it doesn’t automatically delete (i.e. SYNC the delete action) on my Mac or iPad. I have to manually delete any given message THREE TIMES, once on iPhone, a second on Mac, a third on iPad. iCloud message sync was introduced to actually sync messages across all devices, not just push duplicates.
click. send. delete. obviously not a genius.
Why would you unlock your iPhone before giving it to an Apple employee to get your screen fixed?
She’s an idiot.
Apple caters to idiots. That why things ‘just work’.
Trondud shows us his genius yet again. Trondud is obviously an Apple User, and thus an idiot, right?
Yes, Trondud the genius farts out his brilliance on a regular basis here at MDN, and as with all things Trondud, it really is on the nose.
Why? Because they might need to turn it on to make sure it is fixed.
So….they asked her to unlock it after it was fixed and then walked back to the repair area to snoop around on it. Right.
Again, if she let them walk off with an unlocked iPhone then she’s stupid.
“…one of my EXTREMELY PERSONAL pictures that I took for my boyfriend…” How stupid. Her boyfriend this week and the creep who dumped her the next who possibly has that photo in his possession. If people of all sexes don’t want to “express how disgusted I felt and how long I cried after I saw this”, maybe not take such “personal” photos and avoid all this.
Drew Barrymore, while on The Late Show in 1995, lifted her top, flashing David Letterman.
Movie Director Steven Spielberg, her Godfather, offered her this advice, “Cover up.”
Good advice, apparently needed to others then just Drew.
Wonder if any security camera footage from the store could see what this employee was up to?