The employee purportedly went through the customer’s gallery and sent a photo to himself
Apple has fired one of its employees for sending himself a private photo of an iPhone owner who had her device repaired at a store in California.
The iPhone maker recently received a complaint from a female customer, Gloria Fuentes, who had brought in her phone to an Apple store in Bakersfield to have its screen fixed. She accused a male employee of going through her photos and sending one of them to himself using her phone.
Fuentes said she had removed her social media, financial, and banking apps before handing it over to the repair team. However, she didn’t have enough time to delete the photos in her gallery.
After giving her iPhone to the employee, Fuentes noticed that the man started to tinker with her device for a while. He even asked for her phone’s passcode twice, which Fuentes said she found odd.
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Once her phone was fixed, she took it home. This was when she discovered a mysterious text message sent from her smartphone to an unknown number. She soon realized that the Apple employee had gone through her gallery and sent an intimate photo of her to his own number.
“I open [the text] and instantly wanted to cry!!!” Fuentes said. “This guy went through my gallery and sent himself one of my EXTREMELY PERSONAL pictures that I took for my boyfriend and it had my geolocation on so he also knows where I live!!!”
Fuentes reported the incident to the manager of the Apple store, who told her that they would look into the matter. When she confronted the Apple employee, she said the man admitted that the phone number was indeed his but that he didn’t know how the photo was sent to him.
In a statement to The Washington Post, Apple thanked Fuentes for bringing the matter to its attention. After an internal investigation, the company decided to fire the employee after determining that he had violated Apple’s strict privacy guidelines.
This is not the first time Apple had to deal with employees stealing customers’ private photos.
In 2016, the company fired several Apple store workers in Australia for allegedly participating in a “photo-sharing ring” where members would exchange intimate photos of women with each other.