Apple store worker fired for sending customer's intimate photo to his own phone

WTF?! If you're handing over your unlocked phone to someone for repair, make sure to delete anything sensitive or personal. Just ask Gloria Fuentes, who discovered an Apple Store employee texted one of her intimate photos to himself.

As the Washington Post reports, Fuentes had an appointment on November 4 to have her iPhone screen repaired. Sensibly, she deleted all social media and financial apps beforehand and was going to remove all her photos as well, but the store brought the appointment forward a few hours, meaning she never had time.

After arriving in a hurry, Fuentes gave her iPhone to an employee. He began "messing around with it for quite a while," and asked for her passcode twice. "I didn't really pay any mind to it because I just figured he's doing his job, looking into my insurance info or whatever," she wrote in a Facebook post.

Once Fuentes got home, she examined her phone and noticed a text had been sent to an unknown number. When she opened the message, the truth dawned on her: the Apple worker had searched through her photos, found an intimate one, and texted it to himself.

The photo was an "extremely personal" one that Fuentes took for her boyfriend. "It had my geolocation on so he (the employee) also knows where I live," she added.

Fuentes noted that the picture was taken 12 months ago and was in a library of over 5,000 images, meaning the worker must have spent a good amount of time browsing through them. When she went back to the store and confronted the man, he admitted the text was delivered to his number but didn't know how the picture got sent.

Not surprisingly, the man in question was fired by Apple. "We are grateful to the customer for bringing this deeply concerning situation to our attention," a spokesperson said. "Apple immediately launched an internal investigation and determined that the employee acted far outside the strict privacy guidelines to which we hold all Apple employees. He is no longer associated with our company."

Fuentes said she would press charges against the man, and local police have confirmed they are continuing to investigate.

Back in 2016, Apple fired staff from one of its Australian stores following allegations they were stealing intimate photos of female customers from iPhones that were in for repair.