On Wednesday, a former Minnesota state trooper pleaded guilty to texting himself intimate nude photos from a woman’s iPhone after she’d been in a suspected DWI crash.
Albert Kuehne, 37, was originally charged with two felony harassment counts which carried a possible five-year prison sentence, but the former trooper pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of misdemeanor nonconsensual dissemination of private sexual images and agreed to two years of probation.
A 25-year-old woman crashed her car on March 25 last year in Minneapolis, near Cedar Avenue and Interstate 94, according to a criminal complaint seen by NBC News. The woman was detained as a DWI suspect before she was taken to the hospital for treatment.
The woman’s cell phone is synched with her MacBook, prosecutors said.
After she was released from the hospital, the driver’s boyfriend saw in the synched Macbook that her cell phone had been accessed and it sent instant messages “containing nude photographs of the victim to an unknown phone,” according to the complaint.
“Victim’s boyfriend contacted the unknown phone number and the person on the other end of the call eventually identified themselves as the defendant,” the complaint said… “The images in question show victim either nude or partially nude. Two of the photos show (the) victim’s exposed breasts,” the complaint continued. “Victim was interviewed. She denied giving the defendant permission to access her phone.”
Kuehne, who lives in Dayton, Minnesota, was put on administrative leave in May last year and fired four months later.
MacDailyNews Take: To protect against the theft of nude photos or anything else, the iPhone‘s Emergency SOS feature is activated by holding down the Side button and one of the volume buttons*, allows users to quickly contact emergency services and send a message to your emergency contacts. But, and here’s the important thing in this case, the feature also disables Touch ID and Face ID biometrics, meaning the iPhone requires its passcode to unlock it.
Don’t give anyone your iPhone passcode. Talk to your lawyer first.
Another reminder that if you don’t want nude photos and videos online, don’t take them in the first place! — MacDailyNews, June 7, 2021
Those concerned with security and privacy should use a long alphanumeric passcode that mixes numbers, letters, and symbols to thwart brute-force cracking.
To change your password in iOS:
Settings > Face ID & Passcodes > Change Passcode > Passcode Options: Custom Alphanumeric Code
See also: How to forward SMS/MMS text messages from your iPhone to your iPad, iPod touch or Mac.
*On iPhone 7 or earlier, rapidly press the side (or top) button five times to activate Emergency SOS on your iPhone.