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Verizon Worker Arrested For Copying Customer's Nude Pictures
An anonymous reader writes "El Reg reports that two employees at a Verizon store in Florida are facing charges after making copies of a woman's naked pictures while helping her transfer data from an old phone to a new one. The two employees later offered to show the pictures to another customer, but the customer happened to be the woman's friend. The woman and her friend filed a police report. The police quickly got a warrant to search the store and found copies of the pictures on multiple devices there. One of the employees, Gregory Lampert, was arrested and charged with two felonies and a misdemeanor. The other employee, Joshua Stuart, is no longer in Florida, but will face charges if he comes back."
This is stupid and pervy overall, but offering to show it to another CUSTOMER? Can't get much dumber than that.
Where they perchance prior Agents for Geek Squad?
Unwittingly admitting your crime to the customer's friend and getting himself charged with two felonies - Priceless!
Unfortunately this has been going on since the early days of personal computers. Take your PC in for repair, and often times the 'techs' would scour your drive ( or floppies ) looking for 'cool stuff'. 'Cool stuff" could be anything from hoping they find porn and be fairly harmless ( since back then it wasn't as 'free' ) or in more current times, far more malicious and they may search for your bank records or something to blackmail you with later..
Lesson: Trust no one.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Seriously... the Internet has an ocean of nude pictures, and in far higher resolutions than any camera phone could hope to take. You can even get movies in full 1080p of women doing damned near anything and everything you can conceivably think of - be it sexual or not. Nearly any 14-year boy on the planet with Internet access know this!
In conclusion, we know that these two "techs" at the Verizon store aren't exactly carrying a surplus of clue here... ] ...so what does that say about Verizon's hiring standards for technically-minded people? Seriously?
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Stories like this shows up all the time. If it's not nude pictures, then it's the product ID for antivirus or something else. The only thing you really can do about it is to avoid giving access to anybody.
Personally I had a computer which died and had to be fixed on warranty. I swapped the HD just in case and swapped back when it returned. The real problem is for people without the knowledge on how to do that, which would likely be the case for somebody paying for getting data transferred. Once in a while my family states they wouldn't know what to do if I couldn't fix stuff for them.
Another issue is why is there nude pictures on the phone in the first place? Stuff you bring around (like phone and camera) could get stolen, which is why you more or less should plan for how to minimize the damage if it's stolen before it's stolen. Also such stuff is often stolen from places where you didn't expect it to be stolen and hence becomes more careless.
Copying customer's pictures to his own device - Wrong on so many levels.
I have to disagree on the first part, as often times techs will bring their own hardware to a site and copy all the customers files of in preparation for a reload. "please save my pictures and music" ( or in a business, CAD files, or whatever ) as no one ever backs up...
A tech should use a company-owned device for that, not a personal device, and treat all backed-up data as confidential.
However, i dont look thru them, and they are deleted before i leave the site.
So you follow at least some good practices for confidentiality of customers' data. Customers should insist that this practice be written into the terms of service.
Keep accounting or tax records on your computer, or personal files with your information. Then ask some dweeb at a store to copy them over to your new computer???
I'm sorry, but what in the hell did you expect??
Well I actually expected them to copy the files over to the new computer and not make a copy of them. You know, behave professionally and all that.
Practically speaking there is a reason you only hear about dumb criminals; the mart ones are smart because they don't fucking blab about it.
I'll see people who rob or steal something then brag on Facebook publicly about it; at that point you might as well turn yourself in.
Yes, I get this is not upstanding behavior. Is it a 'dealing in stolen property' felony? What the heck is an 'offenses against computer users' felony? Misdemeanor theft, yes. But 'handling lewd materials'? That's a crime? It feels like most of the laws are on the books just so the police can hit you with a zillion for anything then drop most of them to appear like the good guys.
It is a problem with the legal system. It is often difficult to convict based on the exact charge filed. So if they really want to get you convicted on something, they slap you with everything vaguely related and hope something sticks. Unfortunately, with all the millions of laws on the books, everybody is guilty of something. How many people can honestly say they have never went outside on Sunday without a hat on? So basically, anybody can be thrown in jail at any time.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Second, as Bruce Schneier argues in his latest book, Liers and Outliers, society functions on the assumption that most people are honest, and so we don't have to waste a lot of time on excessive sucurity. For example, if we extend the coffe shop example, if you don't always have you car in a secured garage with armed patrol, it is your fault if it gets stolen? I think so, based on the example.
These people got fired because they violated the assumption of trust that Verizon depends on to grow it's business. If I am worried that Vernon reps are primarily there to stea personal data, I will go elsewhere. The fact that the personal data is nude pics is a judgemental viewpoint that has more to do with the confort Jon's own body than the issue at hand.
Tomorrow I will see all these people in these large building just leaving thier cars in unprotected oparking lots, letting thier children run around without proper supervision, letting the public in with no security. I suppose if something happens it will be thier fault, not the malice of the perpetrators. I would hate to live in the world where one is afraid of everything.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Hi, I was dumb enough to hand the keys to my Mercedes to some 'valet' dude and he wrecked it. Guess its my fault!
Good-bye
Not exactly the same.
"I left naked pictures of myself on the passenger seat when I gave my keys to the valet and he took them" is closer.
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The customer wanted the employees to copy data from her phone to her phone. Looking at that data didn't have to happen. Copying pictures from her phone to a personal phone - particularly naked pictures - certainly violated trust and evidently some laws. Going on to redistribute those stolen pictures to other people without the knowledge of the original person pushes it even farther. The part that's nuts in all this is you thinking their actions were okay.
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But he isn't acting as an individual, he's a representative of the company, he was paid during this time. This occurred at a company location, with company equipment. There must be protocols for proper use which were not followed so the employee most likely knew better. If the company made and distributed unauthorized copies of data from your phone and even showed other customers, would you be so lenient had this been your wife/girlfriend/daughter/sister/mother? What if it was tax information?
Let me guess "It's nothing we haven't seen before!"
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No, he looked through the pictures, took a copy and distributed them.
They performed a privacy invasion and a copyright infringement.
Funny thing nobody seems to mention. But the customer, the woman's (boy)friend must have taken up on the offer. Otherwise he couldn't have known it was her. Right?
Secondly, don't you think it might be a good idea to get rid of such photos before going in to get a new phone?
How do you know she didn't? Deleting pictures on a phone does very little. There are several completely freeware utilities that will recover those pictures with no problem. A Verizon in-store repairman would certainly know that.
Flash memory is even more of a problem than one would expect. Since manufacturers know that Flash memory is fallible, they take great care in making sure that the same memory space doesn't get used too many time (on average). Distributing the load on memory usage helps the failure rates stay low. In other words, a picture that you may have taken of yourself one year ago and also deleted that same day one year ago has a high chance of still being on your device to this day (without having been overwritten).
Now you could use sdcard/hardware/system-wide level encryption, but really, who wants to do that these days except for corporations? It makes your device painfully sluggish on reads/writes and it uses more battery. One other option would be to have a removable sdcard for your media files, but this is not a perfect solution either. I am no security expert, but I would only advise someone to take pictures of themselves naked with their phones only if it wasn't the end of the world for them to have those pictures potentially leak out. Perhaps, some Slashdoters can suggest some better solutions, or some good free apps for that specific problem. This is not a topic that I really know about.
For example at work I'm the Windows support lead, an upper level tech support guy basically. This means I have a domain administrator account, the root account on our UNIX systems, the admin account on our NetApp and so on. In other words: I have full access. There is no system in the building I can't get at everything on it.
This means they have to trust me, they have to trust that I won't go and rifle through shit I shouldn't. Even if you naively believe that people never do anything personal on work systems, there's still all kinds of work related stuff I need to leave alone.
And I do, I respect the need for privacy and understand that my access is not synonymous with permission.
Feigned outrage aside, if just about every man out there were in the same position they'd do the same (except showing the pics to customers), given the opportunity.
Anyone who is so weak-willed and untrustworthy that they make copies of a customer's photos doesn't meet my definition of "man".
Don't throw a rock at me for saying this, but... At the very least it was a copyright violation.
And the moral of the story is don't keep nude pics of yourself on your computer, and never, EVER send them to anyone else, because they WILL find their way onto the internet.