Another day and another Apple payout for dodgy practises, this time by an Apple certified repairer has emerged.
Now questions are being raised about Apple’s practise of locking consumers into Apple certified repairers.
What’s been revealed is that Apple has had to payout a multi-million-dollar settlement to a woman whose photos and videos were shared online by technicians repairing her iPhone.
Explicit images and videos were uploaded to Facebook and other places and made to look as if they had been posted by her.
Apple who claim to be concerned about security but are still bowing down to the Chinese Communist Government was not mentioned in the settlement however the information came to light in another court case.
In a statement, Apple said: “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.
“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,” it added.
The incident happened five years ago when a woman studying at the University of Oregon sent her iPhone for repair with Pegatron Technology Service, an Apple repair contractor.
A subsequent investigation by Apple resulted in two technicians being fired.
Ironically, Apple went out of their way to try and hide information about the case by demanding confidentiality and its role in the case was only identified during a legal fight between Pegatron and its insurers, over the compensation it paid to Apple.
In 2019, in a similar case emerged when an Apple Store employee allegedly texted himself an intimate photo of a woman, taken from her phone after she took the device to be repaired.
Apple immediately launched an investigation and said the individual was no longer at the company.
The incident will add weight to the growing Right to Repair movement in the US, which argues that devices such as iPhones should not be locked into official repair shops.
Some 20 US States have proposed Right to Repair legislation, which would force Apple and other manufacturers to make tools and components available to third party technicians.
