This is what male staff at an Apple store in Queensland have allegedly been caught doing red-handed. If the reports are true, they also stole explicit selfie photos from customers’ phones and rated those too. Needless to say, the culprits have been promptly fired by Apple. Good. Riddance.
Staff members from the Carindale Apple store in Brisbane have been caught stealing photos from customer’s phones, taking pictures of customers and staff without their consent, and “ranking” them out of ten. These are the disturbing accusations contained in a report by the Courier-Mail.
In the alarming expose, the Courier-Mail alleges that over 100 “close-up and explicit” images were taken of customers and staff without their consent — and even more were stolen from customer’s phones.
According to Courier Mail’s insider source, the Apple leadership team isn’t answering female staff’s questions about if they have been victims, and affected customers have not been informed of the breach.
Apple confirmed in a statement to Gizmodo that its Carindale store is currently under investigation, and several employees have been terminated for “a violation of Apple’s business conduct policy”. However, the company also insists that there’s no evidence of anyone being photographed without their consent, which seems pretty contradictory.
Here’s the official Apple statement that is currently being sent to news outlets:
“Apple believes in treating everyone equally and with respect, and we do not tolerate behavior that goes against our values. We are investigating a violation of Apple’s business conduct policy at our store in Carindale, where several employees have already been terminated as a result of our findings.
“Based on our investigation thus far, we have seen no evidence that customer data or photos were inappropriately transferred or that anyone was photographed by these former employees. We have met with our store team to let them know about the investigation and inform them about the steps Apple is taking to protect their privacy.”
Apple’s wording here is interesting. “Inappropriately transferred” is especially telling — this strongly suggests that customer photos were accessed and shared at the source, rather than downloaded to another device. Either way, it’s still an unacceptable invasion of customer privacy.
If the Carindale ‘photograph ring’ proves to be genuine, it doesn’t bode well for Apple’s larger workplace culture or HR training. How could something like this be allowed to happen under management’s watch?
We’ll keep an eye on this story as it develops. In the meantime, you might want to swing by one of Apple’s other Brisbane stores if you require a phone repair — and maybe delete highly personal photos first, for good measure.
[Via Gizmodo]
Comments
5 responses to “Hey Apple Staff, Don’t Secretly Take Photos Of Female Colleagues And Rate Them Out Of Ten”
If an employee takes photos of ANYONE and publicly rates them, i’d fully support them being punished, not just photos of female employees.
Now, you just need to do an article about the government who saturated the TV by pointing the finger at young boys for being the root cause of domestic violence (which was about 1000x times worse than this incident on so many levels). Why not create an article about that? Have those vile people been sacked?
If you really want to comment on such things (which AGAIN, don’t help people be better people in any way), I’ve got a BIG list of some absolutely despicable things done by the Australian government in recent times and the media that are FAR, FAR worse than this. These things are a modern trend of some aggressive gender based bullying. And, if I see the government showing such vile prejudice against anyone, i’ll comment (irrespective of the gender – however, there is a clear trend that the target is one gender only).
if you’re going to insist on such articles, start with the worst offenders (eg. the Australian government’s respect web site). Represent ALL people. It’s really simple! Worst offenders first, ignore gender!!!
How’s that local MRA chapter going lately Dan?
Why ‘if you work at apple’
This applies to ANY WORK PLACE.
What about a pornographic website?
I agree with your sentiment 100% btw :p
Speaking about Apple and sneaky pictures… Why is it that when redeeming an iTunes voucher using the camera that the Apple device grabs a sneaky look at you (due to the front-facing selfie camera being activated by default).
Apple aren’t stupid. They know people don’t use the selfie camera to read a bar code. People invariably use the back-facing camera, while aligning the code on their screen.
So the iPad/iPhone usually gets a quick look at the user before the user activates the other camera manually.
Please explain!!