Woman Sues T-Mobile after Employees Allegedly Snoop on Racy Private Video

Megalith said:
A woman in New Jersey is suing T-Mobile for sexual harassment and invasion of privacy after two male employees allegedly browsed her iPhone 7’s camera roll and viewed a “private naked video” of her without consent during the trade-in/upgrade process. She was tipped off by her AirPods, which were still connected and played a “distinct sound” that suggested someone was going through her photos and videos. While she may not deserve any blame, some say people should never leave anything on their phone they wouldn’t want others to see.

N.E. was mortified and left the store immediately in tears. As a recent immigrant from the Middle East, she particularly didn't want her parents to know that she had filmed such an intimate video and, worse, had kept it on her phone where others could find it. "It didn't even bother them, as if I was nothing," she continued. "I felt worthless because, hello, I'm a human being and this is something that's very private. It's like I'm not important. I felt powerless, because I couldn't say anything about it in the moment."
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Well, during tradein/upgrade they usually transfer phone data. So they would have to get into the phone to begin the process. I'm not sure how her headphones are an indication was gouing through her photos unless they were playing her porn video. While I think it's very unprofessional to say the least to be looking at customer data, there are many cases where techs may stumble across that stuff by accident while doing data transfer/backup. I certainly wouldn't condone them looking at her data if that really was the case but she probably will get her way anyhow. It generally is in each person's best interest to backup and clean their phone if they are going to trade in, send for warranty, etc. as we all know shit happens (at someone's will and not).
 
Wrecked Em said:
One the other hand though, if they would have found child porn, we would be calling them heroes.
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I'm sure that would have nothing at all to do with the fact that child porn is orders of magnitude worse than what they did. You're not going to charge a person for illegally carrying a gun after they used it to stop a mass murder either. Doesn't make arresting that person for the crime at another time hypocritical or whatever point you're trying to make here.
 
joobjoob said:
Tmobile employees + lady who records naked phone videos then unlocks her phone and hands it to strangers = no sympathetic innocents
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The difference between this and letting contractors into your house who while you are downstairs start going through your underwear draw etc?
 
Well, couldn't it be they going into the pictures to see to it they are transferred, stuff like that? So let's say they did go in it... No legitimate reason whatsoever?
It absolutely has to be they are some terrible employees?
I know I wrestled a lot with my wife's phone, so much, i just gave up on a ton of pictures (did managed to back them in my computer though, besides google cloud) and files.... But yeah, I don't have any tools though.
If its all true, yeah its shit, but people lie too ( sadly) to sue shit like that... Sucks to say it, and if this woman is being truthful I am sure it hurts to read being questioned on it, and people skeptical and such.
 
Meaker said:
The difference between this and letting contractors into your house who while you are downstairs start going through your underwear draw etc?
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This is more like having contractors over to fix your dresser and getting upset that they found the bad dragon collection you keep in your dresser..... You probably should have moved them prior if you are mortified by the thought of someone finding them.
 
Kardonxt said:
This is more like having contractors over to fix your dresser and getting upset that they found the bad dragon collection you keep in your dresser..... You probably should have moved them prior if you are mortified by the thought of someone finding them.
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That makes no sense. At what point in doing a phone-to-phone transfer (something that has been automatic for YEARS) do employees have the right to go through private files? There is no fucking reason for them to go looking through her pictures or ANY part of the files on her phone while her back is turned.
 
Who's talking about rights here? The girl's a moron for handing over a device with that on it. The kids handling it are morons for snooping through her shit. T-Mobile's a bunch of morons for paying a small wage that only immature kids would work for and expecting data to be handled responsibly. Consumers are morons because they wouldn't buy plans from a more expensive company, that employs competent employees, even if they could.

Everyone is a moron and I don't feel the least bit bad for any of them. What I find most amusing is people are still storing shit like this on their devices and expecting privacy. I'm not sure how many more data breaches the public needs before they realize privacy on a connected device is an illusion.
 
Mega6 said:
subpoena and if it was erased afterwards, its tampering. There is also forensic software to recover data that is not fully formatted.
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She didn't say anything initially so depending on when it was erased it might not qualify. Speaking to someone that knows the refurbishment business, good luck. They pick up "new stock" weekly and it's in lots not tracked by serial number. Broken screen and mic? Not going to go for a quick turnaround refurb, it's going to be sold to a scrapper who will disassemble it and sell the main bits that work.

Now if it took her more than a couple days, it was already erased. Heck at the local store they theoretically erase everything at CoB. Now if she waited a week to tell her BF, you'd be lucky to be able to find out where the bits of her phone went after disassembly.
 
The biggest problem to start with is that....She doesn't even know her self if they looked at anything. She heard a sound on the airpods....What sound? Somehow that sound means they were looking at the video, I would assume if they were looking at the video, the audio from the video would be playing and not just a "distinct sound" of someone going through a camera roll. They were not hiding nor hidden from view, they were out in the open from her own tell of events and yet no proof of anything happening from the in store video.

Not saying it's a money grab just yet but....
 
Jehuty said:
T-Mobile will need to do some groveling and pay her a hefty sum of money to settle. The employees will likely get criminal charges, good luck fighting that one. T-Mobile ain’t gonna help them there.

No one should have to have their privacy violated even if it’s for a trade in where customers give consent to transfer files, it’s not view them.
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Criminal charges for what? Show me the crime.

If you are doing a trade in, back it up and wipe the device. They don't shred the things. You need to assume that even in the absence of malicious activity that the company or employees might just be LAZY and hand it on toe a third party without wiping your personal data. Don't count on the other guy to not be lazy.
 
Assuming they could use the phone after they erased it (need to make sure find my iPhone is turned off)

Its not that hard to reset the phone after the phone has been copied to new phone
 
Wait, did she trade in her phone and then put her earbuds in? Or do they just always sit in her ears turned on?

Also weird, any phone I've traded in it was tested right in front of me at the table we sit at with the rep. I also wipe it first, but I know there are likely many people that don't do this. Don't want any sales rep to find my D-pics I download from the internet to send to ladies as if it were my own!

Just kidding, I don't have any ladies numbers...
 
Found her.........

giphy.gif












/jk :D
 
Megalith said:
A woman in New Jersey is suing T-Mobile for sexual harassment and invasion of privacy after two male employees allegedly browsed her iPhone 7’s camera roll and viewed a “private naked video” of her without consent during the trade-in/upgrade process. She was tipped off by her AirPods, which were still connected and played a “distinct sound” that suggested someone was going through her photos and videos. While she may not deserve any blame, some say people should never leave anything on their phone they wouldn’t want others to see.

N.E. was mortified and left the store immediately in tears. As a recent immigrant from the Middle East, she particularly didn't want her parents to know that she had filmed such an intimate video and, worse, had kept it on her phone where others could find it. "It didn't even bother them, as if I was nothing," she continued. "I felt worthless because, hello, I'm a human being and this is something that's very private. It's like I'm not important. I felt powerless, because I couldn't say anything about it in the moment."
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This is exactly why I typically copy off all my data and wipe the phone, and return it to factory reset before I upgrade. I also typically offload anything to encrypted removable media rather than leaving it on my phone at all.
 
The Mad Atheist said:
Don't know why employees should feel they need to browse people's stuff, even tho it's a trade in.
Hope her parents don't find out, heard some fam fams love 'honor killing'......
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sfsuphysics said:
The problem is Tmobile is going to get hammered for this but they didnt do anything wrong. It was a couple "employees" who at worst get fired from a job at some kiosk or tmobile store and next week they get a job at an AT&T, Sprint or MetroPCS store or kiosk.

Not saying the woman doesnt deserve anything but those guys should be facing criminal charges at the least
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It helps to have the full story about the events. Typically people ask for their data and photos to be copied over to the new phone. Sometimes some photos won't copy over because they aren't in a typical area. She may have asked them to make sure they get everything, in which they may have stumbled upon these.

Now, that does not excuse them for watching or goggling over them.

Personally I used to do data recovery for friends, family, and private clients. I have run into a number of things over the years doing this. Many times it has been unavoidable due to the requests made, and every time I try to be as discrete as possible. I certainly don't watch any videos unless specifically asked (as in they want to make sure the full video is recovered, which has been requested before). Also some clients don't realize when I do data recovery anything they have marked "hidden" I am still going to see with the recovery tools.

All of this is another reason why I strongly urge people to move any of that off on some kind of encrypted removable media if they want to keep it.
 
Willingly handing someone your unlocked device with your porn video on it is hilarious.

Willingly trading in your unlocked device full of your personal information and porn video is priceless.
 
You know... I factory reset a CyanogenMod nexus 6, weirdly the next person to program their account on it ( family member) started getting all of my wife pictures in their photo app... So all the phone's pictures still there. Weird.
 
SamuraiInBlack said:
If you aren't factory resetting your phone before handing it off to someone you know is going to have access to all your shit on it, you are at their mercy, period.
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Its kind of difficult to get your stuff transferred to your new phone if you do a factory reset before you have a new phone.
 
Lizard Testes said:
Its kind of difficult to get your stuff transferred to your new phone if you do a factory reset before you have a new phone.
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Is it? Most phones these days come with tools to backup your data yourself, which can then be restored to your new phone...
 
Uvaman2 said:
You know... I factory reset a CyanogenMod nexus 6, weirdly the next person to program their account on it ( family member) started getting all of my wife pictures in their photo app... So all the phone's pictures still there. Weird.
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There are a few ways this can happen. In your case it was probably because the photos were saved in a non-standard location, probably by a different app. A factory reset won't automatically wipe that location and when the app comes back online, it will still look in that location. Another way that happens is if someone has a cloud data point setup, and the app reconnects to that cloud data point. Typically a factory reset should resolve that situation, especially if it is a different account, but not always. This is again why I strongly urge people to move it to encrypted removable media.
 
The Mad Atheist said:
Don't know why employees should feel they need to browse people's stuff, even tho it's a trade in.
Hope her parents don't find out, heard some fam fams love 'honor killing'......
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How does anyone know they did?

I'm not an apple user, so I have no actual knowledge of how this app supposedly works with her Airpods, but how do we know the little sound wasn't simply triggered by the file copy process as part of upgrading to a new phone?

Maybe the two employees didn't look guilty because they weren't actually doing anything wrong to begin with ? ("It didn't even bother them, as if I was nothing,")
 
Jehuty said:
T-Mobile will need to do some groveling and pay her a hefty sum of money to settle. The employees will likely get criminal charges, good luck fighting that one. T-Mobile ain’t gonna help them there.

No one should have to have their privacy violated even if it’s for a trade in where customers give consent to transfer files, it’s not view them.
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Yea maybe not.
 
Mega6 said:
Should be pretty easy to show file access after the time phone was given to T-mobile.
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They were copying the data from the old phone to the new phone, of course the files were accessed? probably triggered the tone in her Airpods too.
 
NWRMidnight said:
Well, actually, once she traded it in, the phone, including all it's content becomes the property of T-Mobile. Hence why it is recommended to wipe and reset your phones before handing over your phone. It's very possible that they where just testing to see if the phone worked, and just clicked on anything that was available to test it, with no thought of what it might be.
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Wrong, ain't their phone until they are done transferring the data and deliver the new phone.
 
lcpiper said:
How does anyone know they did?

I'm not an apple user, so I have no actual knowledge of how this app supposedly works with her Airpods, but how do we know the little sound wasn't simply triggered by the file copy process as part of upgrading to a new phone?

Maybe the two employees didn't look guilty because they weren't actually doing anything wrong to begin with ? ("It didn't even bother them, as if I was nothing,")
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I imagine at this point they have seen it all anyways. And yea they could have been testing the unit, see there is a video in photos folder and clicked it. Thumbnail may not have had any indication of what it was, in the case of my iphone a lot of them end up as a black thumbnail because it takes me a second to get my stupid hand out of the way of the lens lol.

If she claims to have heard herself, I have heard myself in a recording and wouldn't recognize my own voice to save my life lol.

If anonymity is what she is hoping for, going public with a lawsuit might not have been her best choice either.

In my opinion, intent has to be established. If they were just testing with a video to verify phone function then what can you expect, at least put that stuff in the hidden folder so it isn't the first thing seen.
 
sfsuphysics said:
Does absolutely no one transfer stuff from one phone to another anymore? I'm guessing this is kind of why they had the phone in the first place, I mean she was still in the store for crying out loud while it was happening.
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Actually, the last new phone I bought from Best Buy, they wouldn't transfer my data for me. It's all cloud based now, they just wipe the old phone and your new phone syncs up. Too easy.
 
mnewxcv said:
Agreed. I always send my nude selfies via first class USPS.
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FYI-US Overnight Mail is actually a prescribed method to send Classified documents through. There are packaging issues you have to follow, but you can do it...
 
GT98 said:
FYI-US Overnight Mail is actually a prescribed method to send Classified documents through. There are packaging issues you have to follow, but you can do it...
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Oversimplification of the processes and conditions required, but yes. Also true for FEDEX and I believe UPS as well. They are special services provided with a special process, so you can't just walk up to any location and send classified documents.
 
You know, when I work on a computer, phone or whatever, all the stuff on it is private. I don't go searching things if I don't need to or if it's not part of the process. If I come across something, I'm not going to go snooping (if it's CP, I shutdown and call the proper authorities. Happened one time.), I'm not going to check pictures. Except when I'm tasked to move/copy/transfer/view pictures. I don't care if they have a folder on the desktop called "My Nudes", it's off limits.

Should some of the blame go to this woman? I wouldn't say so. These people went out of their way to view private information that isn't necessary to do the job. Almost like a contractor coming into your home, then going into your closet and checking out your homemade porn stash. It's out of the scope for what they are doing.
 
Reason #3698 you reset to factory settings before selling or trading in your cell phone.
 
What if the video wasn't of her but she downloaded it and staged it as such? She just happened to have her airpods in and on listen after she handed over the phone? What if this was setup as a sham to get money?

It said she heard it from the earpods that were still in her ears and synced. That part alone seems fishy to me. Do you not take them out of your ears? Or did this entire conversation happen while she had them in?

Just like to kick the dirt around for thought.

edit:

36.Though Plaintiff is being ignored by Defendant T-Mobile, Defendant Victor has

contacted Plaintiff through a mutual acquaintance asking that she drop this matter.

Interesting that they have a mutual acquaintance with the guy that looked at the videos.
 
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Ur_Mom said:
You know, when I work on a computer, phone or whatever, all the stuff on it is private. I don't go searching things if I don't need to or if it's not part of the process. If I come across something, I'm not going to go snooping (if it's CP, I shutdown and call the proper authorities. Happened one time.), I'm not going to check pictures. Except when I'm tasked to move/copy/transfer/view pictures. I don't care if they have a folder on the desktop called "My Nudes", it's off limits.

Should some of the blame go to this woman? I wouldn't say so. These people went out of their way to view private information that isn't necessary to do the job. Almost like a contractor coming into your home, then going into your closet and checking out your homemade porn stash. It's out of the scope for what they are doing.
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Apparently this video was with a bunch of other plain videos, so it wasn't in anything marked. Second, the woman was mortified because of her cultural background. She was worried about her family finding out, so yes, part of the blame definitely goes on her. Third, all we have is a she said situation. We don't even have the he said, nor any actual facts to go on.
 
lcpiper said:
Actually, the last new phone I bought from Best Buy, they wouldn't transfer my data for me. It's all cloud based now, they just wipe the old phone and your new phone syncs up. Too easy.
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Ahhh so now all your homemade porn is in the cloud waiting to get hacked, and its your fault for storing it there :) TheFappeningDeux
 
LMFAO, you guys really know how to stretch an explanation...

Manually transferring data from one device to another (never mind it hasn't been manual for decades-Tmobile has a dock, old device goes in, new device goes in, data transfers)
non-standard location of photos on an iPhone (obviously not applicable)
questioning the "distinct sound" (it's called discretion...the article is obviously alluding to some sort of moan or sound that would be evident to anyone invovlved; how is this surprising to anyone who has ever watched porn or just a popup and had to jump to the volume within half a second because a kid or wife walked in earshot--it sure the hell is a distinct sound!)
 
BlueFireIce said:
The biggest problem to start with is that....She doesn't even know her self if they looked at anything. She heard a sound on the airpods....What sound? Somehow that sound means they were looking at the video, I would assume if they were looking at the video, the audio from the video would be playing and not just a "distinct sound" of someone going through a camera roll. They were not hiding nor hidden from view, they were out in the open from her own tell of events and yet no proof of anything happening from the in store video.
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from the filing:
Moments later, Plaintiff’s entire body went into a state of alarm as she heard through the wireless headphones synced with her cell phone still in her ears that Defendant Victor was accessing and playing an intimate video saved in Plaintiff’s camera application.
 
ChoGGi said:
from the filing:
Moments later, Plaintiff’s entire body went into a state of alarm as she heard through the wireless headphones synced with her cell phone still in her ears that Defendant Victor was accessing and playing an intimate video saved in Plaintiff’s camera application.
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?
 
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