Apple to Pay Millions of Dollars to Student After Her Nude Images Were Posted on Facebook By Repair Technicians

The student found out that employees had uploaded personal explicit images and videos to her Facebook account from the phone during the repair process.

Oregon: In a shocking breach of privacy, iPhone technicians posted personal, explicit images and videos of a 21-year-old female student on social media after she sent her iPhone to a repair facility. The case dates back to 2016 when the Oregon student took her phone to a California repair center operated by Apple contractor Pegatron. After the case led to a lawsuit, Apple has now agreed to pay millions of dollars as compensation to the student and has settled the case.

According to a report in The Telegraph, the incident took place at Apple supplier Pegatron’s facility in California while the customer’s phone was in for repair. However, the student found out that employees had uploaded personal explicit images and videos to her Facebook account from the phone during the repair process. About 10 images and videos from her personal on-device photo library were shared online by the repair technicians, who made it seem as if she posted them. The images were later deleted only after the woman’s friends told her about them but it was too late as the images had been seen by countless number of people.

After the case came to light, the employees involved were fired and the company assured her that such incidents would not happen in the future.

Soon after, lawyers representing the victim threatened to sue for invasion of privacy and infliction of emotional distress, leading to a “multimillion-dollar” settlement” to put the matter to rest. Apple was not named in the lawsuit, only referred to as a ‘customer’ to keep the matter private. The exact amount of compensation is not known but legal records show her lawyers asked $5 million for “severe emotional distress.”

Apple said in a statement to The Telegraph, ”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.”