Apple Employee Lands In Trouble After Texting Himself Private Photo On Client's Phone

Gloria Fuentes submitted her phone at an Apple store for repairs last week after she scrubbed some personal data from the device.

She described it as a sense of foreboding that made her delete a lot of the apps ahead of the appointment in Bakersfield, California.

She removed all social media, financial and banking applications before she took her phone to be repaired on November 4th.

She even intended to delete her photos, but ran out of time and decided just to submit it as it was to a store employee.

Fuentes claimed she did not mind him checking her phone because Fuentes supposed he must have been verifying the insurance or something.

She noted he spent quite a bit of time with the device and asked her for her passcode twice.

When Gloria got back home, she realized that she was right to have worried in the first place. When she turned on the phone, she noticed a text had been sent to an unknown number.

The Apple worker had gone through her gallery and retrieved a private photo before proceeding to text the photo to his number.

The picture, in this case, was taken more than a year ago.

She claimed that she opened the message sent and wanted to cry. The employee had gone through her phone gallery and selected one of her extremely personal photos that she had taken for her boyfriend.

The other troubling bit is it had her geo-location, so now he was aware of her current address.

Fuentes stated she went back to the store and got the manager. He said he would look into the matter. She also confronted the worker who admitted to the fact the number was his, but he claimed he did not know how the photo was sent.

Apple has intervened since the matter became known and gave a statement saying they are grateful to the customer for bringing the situation to their attention.

They launched an internal investigation and found the worker was far beyond their mandate pertaining to privacy guidelines and was terminated immediately.

There have been incidents like this before, but they are not common for Apple. In 2016, Apple store employees in Brisbane were fired after they were caught having taken candid photos of female staff and stealing photos from customer’s phones.

Fuentes claimed she would be pressing charges on the employee. She did not return messages requesting further comment on the story. The Bakersfield police department said they would be investigating the case.