San Francisco: Apple has paid millions to a woman in the US after it found after an investigation that iPhone repair technicians uploaded explicit content from her phone to her Facebook account.
According to a report in The Telegraph, while the iPhone was being repaired at Pegatron’s California facility, two technicians uploaded sexually explicit photos and a video from Oregon college student Jane Doe’s phone to her Facebook account in 2016.
Apple has also confirmed the incident in a statement to The Verge.
“Court documents say the files were uploaded in a way that suggested Doe had posted them herself, and her attorney asked Apple for $5 million in compensation for the resulting emotional distress,” the report said.
The exact amount of an agreement wasn’t revealed but it amounted to a “multimillion-dollar” deal.
According to court documents, Apple performed an “exhaustive investigation” of the facility and the two employees responsible for the incident were fired.
“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,” an Apple spokesperson said in a statement.
“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,” the company spokesperson was quoted as saying,
Taiwanese electronics manufacturing company Pegatron reportedly reimbursed Apple for the settlement and then sued its own insurance provider for refusing to cover the payment.
According to the report, Apple got its name removed from the court filings but the identity was revealed in an unrelated case involving Apple and Pegatron, where lawyers said the customer was “clearly Apple.”