Both workers were fired following an investigation.
Apple has paid millions of dollars to settle a lawsuit with a woman who had explicit photos and videos leaked from her iPhone after she had sent it for repair.
The company made the payment to the woman after she handed over her phone to be repaired at an Apple-approved repair contractor called Pegatron Technology Service in California. Subsequently, technicians at the facility uploaded “extremely personal and private material” to the woman's Facebook account and other places on the internet.
Originally reported by
The Telegraph, the media was uploaded in such a way as to make it look like the woman had uploaded it herself.
The woman sued Apple and eventually settled with the company for a multi-million dollar sum following the 2016 incident.
Neither Apple nor the woman were directly named in the lawsuit but the case came to light after it was cited in a separate case against Pegatron Technology Service.
Apple confirmed the story to
The Guardian on Monday.
“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,” an Apple spokesperson told the Guardian.
“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,” the spokesperson added.
It comes as Apple increased its spotlight on privacy at the firms annual developers' conference this week with a host of new features to prevent ad tracking and also provide users a greater understanding of permissions certain apps require.
