Apple paid woman millions after repair techs posted explicit pictures from her iPhone

Both workers at Apple contractor Pegatron in California fired after investigation

Apple paid woman millions after techs posted explicit pictures from her iPhone (Getty Images)

Apple paid millions of dollars to settle a lawsuit with a woman who had explicit personal photos and videos leaked from her iPhone after she sent it in for repair.

The tech giant made the payment after the unnamed woman’s phone was handed over in 2016 to a Pegatron facility in Sacramento, California, to be looked at by technicians.

Two of employees of that company, which is an Apple contractor, then reportedly posted “10 photos of her in various stages of undress and a sex video” to the woman’s own Facebook account.

The content was only removed when a friend of the victim, who was then a student in Oregon, raised the alarm.

The woman then threatened a $5m lawsuit against Apple for invasion of privacy and emotional distress.

Now the lawsuit has been settled for an undisclosed “multi-million dollar” amount, according to reports.

Both of the workers were fired following an “exhaustive” investigation by Apple.

“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,” Apple 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.”

Confidentiality agreements in the case prevented both parties from discussing the settlement, but its existence was made public in court papers from a separate lawsuit.

A dispute arose after the insurers in the case refused to pay out the settlement figure the company had reimbursed to Apple and were sued by Pegatron.

Apple had successfully had its name removed from the filings, and is referred to as “customer” in the court papers.

But its identity was eventually revealed in an unrelated March lawsuit between the two companies, in which lawyers stated that the customer was “clearly Apple.”

Apple is not the first company to be hit by a lawsuit over the invasion of a customer’s privacy.

In 2015 Best Buy settled a lawsuit from a customer who alleged that members of the company’s Geek Squad had copied a woman’s nude photos and posted them online.