A young woman in the UK said employees at the Samsung official center where she took her smartphone to change the screen have accessed pictures and private messages on her device.
Samsung Service Centre
Jo Tiffin-Lavers, aged 28, paid 260 pounds for repair at the Samsung Support Center in Croydon. When the phone was taken, the micro-SD card and SIM card were handed over, but images remained on the phone, some of them sensitive. The young woman says she was asked to disable the pattern used as a security method so that employees can test the phone after changing the screen. The repair took just over two hours.
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After the phone was repaired, the young woman found evidence that the staff at the service center had accessed their private conversations, the Instagram account, and they looked at the pictures. More messages received on her WhatsApp from her fiancé and unread were open after repair, and some private images were uploaded to the cloud, although Jo did not have this feature enabled. The young woman said she had a lot of pictures on the phone, but only the “very private” ones were accessed. “I cried all night and could not sleep,” she said.
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After the incident went viral on the social networks, the service center offered to return the money to the customer, but no one apologized for the incident. Samsung has announced that it is investigating this case and will keep in touch with Tiffin-Lavers during the investigation. A similar incident occurred in 2016 in Brisbane, Australia, when employees of an Apple service center stole away “indecent” images from several smartphone customers. The culprits were then fired.
