Apple pays millions to woman after explicit photos posted online

Apple paid millions of dollars to a student after iPhone repair technicians posted explicit photos and videos from her phone to Facebook, legal documents have revealed.

The tech giant agreed a settlement with the 21-year-old after two employees at a repair facility uploaded the images from a phone she had sent to Apple to be fixed, resulting in “severe emotional distress”.

The incident, which occurred in 2016 at a centre in California run by Pegatron, an Apple contractor, is one of the most significant privacy violations to be revealed at an iPhone repair facility.

Apple has often argued that its control over how its devices can be fixed helps to protect customers’ privacy, lobbying against legislation that would make it easier for third parties to fix its electronics.

Legal filings show that the unnamed victim, a university student in Oregon, sent her phone to Apple after it had stopped working.

While it was being fixed, the two technicians posted “10 photos of her in various stages of undress and a sex video” from her Facebook account, in a way that suggested she had uploaded them herself. The images were only removed after friends informed her that they had been posted.

The exact size of the settlement was not disclosed, but was described in filings as a “multimillion-dollar” sum, and that lawyers for the individual had demanded $5m (£3.6m) in negotiations.

Lawyers for the victim had threatened to sue for invasion of privacy and infliction of emotional distress, and had warned of the “negative media publicity” that would accompany a lawsuit. The settlement included a confidentiality provision that prevented her from discussing the case or revealing the size of the payout.