A California woman has issued a warning on Facebook after discovering that an Apple store employee texted himself an intimate photo from her phone.
Gloria Fuentes took her phone into the Valley Plaza Apple store in Bakersfield, California, on November 4 to get the screen repaired.
Before handing her phone over to a man on the tech team, Fuentes had taken the precaution of removing social media apps and financial information from the device.
On November 5 on Facebook, Fuentes wrote that she had intended to delete all the photos from her phone too but had forgotten to do so in her haste to make it to the store after her original appointment time was unexpectedly brought forward.
"So I go in, I give the guy my phone he’s messing around with it for quiet [sic] a while and 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," wrote Fuentes.
The employee asked Fuentes for her passcode twice before eventually handing her phone back to her unfixed and advising her to contact her phone company to arrange a repair.
Fuentes wrote: "I walk in my house turn on my phone about to text someone and realize there’s a message to an unsaved number!!!!! I open it and instantly wanted to cry!!! 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!!!"
The intimate shot had been taken a year earlier and was one of around 5,000 photos on Fuentes' phone.
"He had to have scrolled up for a while to get to that picture," wrote Fuentes.
Disgusted by her discovery, Fuentes returned to the Apple store to speak to the man.
Fuentes wrote: "I went back to the store and confronted him and he admits to me that this was his number but that 'he doesn't know how that pic got sent!!' The manager just said he’d look into it."
Not knowing the full extent or ramifications of the incident was of great concern to Fuentes.
"I have no idea if he sent more than the picture that he forgot to delete and I have no clue what he's going to do with them," wrote Fuentes.
"This makes me cry thinking about it but I think he needs to be held accountable and anyone else that has had him work on their phone should be aware of the fact that there’s a possibility that he’s done this to them!!"
In an emailed statement, Apple told The Washington Post, "We are grateful to the customer for bringing this deeply concerning situation to our attention. 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."