An employee at an Auckland mobile repair shop has been suspended after allegedly trying to forward intimate photos of a customer to himself, from a phone she'd handed over to be fixed.
The incident has sparked fears around privacy. This morning, Consumer NZ chief executive Jon Duffy provided advice on how people can help prevent it happening.
On the incident itself, Duffy said it is "up there" with as one of the most "blatant acts" he has come across, both in his current role and his previous role as the assistant privacy commissioner.
He said he hoped the police were involved and a complaint was made to the privacy commissioner's office.
"The question that is outstanding for me here is: This person has been caught in this instance; has it happened on previous occasions; and, if so, what’s been done with any material that’s been downloaded?"
"There could be criminal offending here there could be crimes act offences being committed by this employee. If this is a pattern of offending, if intimate images taken from people’s phones are then being shared distributed on the internet…
"This is really serious stuff, this is a terrible invasion of those people’s privacy, or at least this one person’s privacy that we know of, and we need a full investigation to get to the bottom of what has happened."
How common is this type of behaviour?
Duffy said privacy regulators "across the globe" were dealing with complaints from an activity called "employee browsing".
"This is a kind of an element of that, most commonly you’d hear cases where a celebrity patient goes to hospital and staff at the hospital will look up what is wrong with that person, or police staff might have a look at what’s going on on someone’s criminal record when they‘re not actually investigating that person. Those are really serious things, and those employers need to take action to limit that sort of stuff.
"This is akin to that. It’s not uncommon that these types of things go on but what employers need to do in these circumstances is really train their staff to say that this isn’t on."
How can someone help prevent this?
Duffy said handing over a phone to a repairer is a vulnerable situation, as people have intimate details of their lives on their devices.
He added it was similar to visiting a doctor or lawyer, as people shared details which they would reasonably expect not to be shared.
Duffy said some Samsung phones have a "maintenance mode" setting, which can lock a phone down to its factory settings. That meant the repairer couldn't poke around but they could still get in and do what they needed to do.
“If your phone doesn’t have that capability, it’s a really good idea to do a backup of your phone, and restore the factory settings. That’s quite a nuclear option but, if there’s stuff on there you really don’t want people accessing, that’s a good way of doing it.
“Similarly, if you can’t be bothered taking that nuclear option, log out of apps. Log out of apple or log out of Google.”
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