*long-winded, please please bear with me*
Remember how I mentioned my iPhone was in the shop? Like a month ago?
Ok – backstory. This is the iPhone 5 that I have had for about 6 months, after dropping my 4 in the dogs water. I have this annoying habit of popping everything in my bra then when I lean over to do stuff…argh.
Anyway.
My dad was down for a couple of nights, so I left Bailey with him and wandered off to check what on earth has happened to my phone, go to the Laundromat, blah blah. I walked into my mobile phone providers shop – quite a large national company, and started fiddling with the display phones while I waited for someone to get to me. Got to the iPhones and pressed the button on the 4…hey that lock screen looks familiar. Unlocked it and it was my old Facebook home page.
Fuck. Me.
In total disbelief I flicked through the phone, yep all my apps. Into the messages, every text from all of 2012. On my Facebook, even though there’s no sim in display phones, you can still see a good amount of my messages, it just won’t load more. But it will load all previous texts, my whole call log, 50 emails. Went into photos, pictures of Bailey and other people’s kids. WordPress app – every post from here to here in entirety.
A health app with all my medical details, weight, height, treatments I’ve had – everything. A period tracker.
Oh. My. God.
Once the nice girl in the shop believed it was actually my phone I made her cut it down and kept it with me. She called her manager really upset…asked me to come back in and meet him a couple of hours later. Which was a total waste of time, he just wanted to apologise…
Not that anything can fix it but holy shit.
I rang consumer protection and spoke to two people that were just totally shocked and angry on my behalf.
It takes a lot to get me angry but I am so seeing red over this!
Any thoughts??
x
I’m totally inept when it comes to cell phones…I am no help! (sorry)
Hahaha, you’re still awesome xx
Perhaps your state’s attorney general would pursue a consumer protection claim. A lawyer might advise you as to whether you could make a claim for personal injury resulting from the disclosure of private information. The law of your home state would have to be examined. http://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/publication-private-facts. Perhaps a lawyer’s letter and demand for some sort of settlement would work. I cannot imagine how they did this without removing and replacing a SIM card or its equivalent before putting the item into a display. It is outrageous. If I thought people could see all that I’d also be furious. It’s terrible.
Thankyou so much for that link! Yep furious is a good word. I can’t imagine either. They say it must have dried out and starting working at some point and got put in the wrong box. The first person said it’d only been up 2 days but then the manager said he put it up Saturday 😦 but wasn’t sure if it was the Saturday just gone or the one before, etc etc, I don’t trust them at all, it’s been out of my hands six months :(. There was no sim in it but a lot of information is held in the phones themselves…when I handed it in it wouldn’t even turn on or I would have wiped it beforehand…just OMG. I can’t believe I found it x
Holy crap. That’s insane. You could always use some type of media to voice your outrage like a magazine or Today Tonight. Wish I knew more to help you. I had a wave of anxiety wash over me as I read that; can’t begin to think how you would have felt!
I almost vomited in the shop. Every time I look through a little more I feel completely ill. There’s masses of messages between Craig and I. The guy(s) I saw on and off all last year. Maybe some slightly questionable stuff mixed in. Photos of other people’s kids. Yeah I considered that too – I’m getting advice and trying to follow the proper course of action (which is super hard because no-one I speak to has heard of a breach to this degree before) but if they don’t admit their fuck-up and show me that this can never ever happen to anyone else I’ll definitely be going to the media. As is two official people have said that it is likely to end up a legal battle that the media will pick up on :(. I feel sick over this but can’t just let it go..:(x
I know how that must feel, to have the media involved, but someone always has to be that “first case” and it’ll pave the way for companies to have to deal with this sort of thing. I remember way back when the courts didn’t know how to deal with social media bullying and such because there were no rules. Don’t let it go. You’ll be doing other people a great service in the future I think. xox
Yep, I let them have my thoughts today, pretty sure I was on speakerphone for the whole 15 minutes straight I was screaming. Then I apologized and said it wasn’t directed at her and thank you for hearing me rant, she was also super nice… but I was so fucking irate I needed the store to know that this was a big thing.
She kept saying she was sorry and could understand but she wasn’t allowed to comment further.
You have every right to be really really upset, heaps of your stuff was on there too :(. I feel bad for the one nice staff member because she has been so lovely to me in the past…the company should have taken it out of the stores hands straight away and assumed full responsibility though!! :(x
Definitely! This should never had happened
Holy shit…I would be pissed too. That is not OK.
I know right? I’m so upset. I am the kinda person where almost anything can be fixed with a genuine apology…but just. Gah. No words. x
I have an old Nokia ‘dumb’ phone and I don’t even take that everywhere with me. This whole GCHQ UK and CIA access to social media websites and the whole surveillance society thing in the UK & US news at the moment has been an obvious result of the technological revolution we’re going through, so hearing that your private information hadn’t been wiped from a resale phone is something that I’d consider as something inevitable someone somewhere would suffer at some point in relation to the the smart phone/ cell phone culture. Mind you that doesn’t mean I wasn’t shocked or don’t understand your outrage, it really did stun me to hear about it, but I wasn’t surprised that any company might make such a negligent mistake, let’s face it they’re only in it for the money. I’m online and I have stuff out there, but I’m careful what I share and as for smart phones, I don’t like them, I really don’t. Sooner or later smart phones are going to be part of controlling people’s lives not just assisting them and your story indicates that if stuff held in the actual phone’s hard memory system doesn’t get wiped and can be sold to someone else then sooner or later the smart phones will be hard wired to transmit out all the stuff in your phone and ‘cloud store’ it where it could be viewed by anyone who pays for it or anyone who breaks into the memory bank can steal it and sell it. I have tweeted this and fb’d it because I think people with smart phones should know this. Sorry to hear about this happening to you and I’m sure if I hadn’t heard it from you I’d have heard about it happening to someone else, on the news, before the year was out.
Thankyou so much for sharing this! I know what you mean about having stuff out there but being careful – I know someone is likely to say ‘oh well she has a personal blog anyway’ but that is my choice and I certainly wouldn’t stick up a link attached to my full name anywhere. Let alone in my hometown. The phone I have with them for repair right now, I restored to factory settings before handing in, but the phone they were using as display wouldn’t even turn on when I handed it in. Thank goodness I took the sim out. I just can’t believe I found it. Amazed.
Every time I’ve looked at a display cell phone, I always thought whatever was on it was there to show off the features. Hopefully no one dug through it.
Hope that you’ve changed all your passwords for any accounts on the phone, and stopped and gotten new credit cards for any purchases you’ve made online.
At the very least, they should give you an awful lot of free service.
I very much hope not too…I mean, I think I’m a good person and I try to be a good mum, member of society etc…but nowhere close to perfect. So there is some…dodgy personal type content in there. And the last couple of years have been intense for me and all the content in my phone reflects that. Argh. x
Hey, this just occurred to me – can you check the logs of the phone to see if anything has been forwarded, and to what numbers/emails?
Might be helpful to know either way…
[…] addition to the phone thing (which I may have a resolution for fairly soon) there was a mistake with a parking ticket, so I […]
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