To fully appreciate the gravitas of this story we need to observe the evidence....for ahem....research.....

Paris..like you need a reason ;-)

Also seems to mean having a good rummage throught and then sharing with anybody that will have a look.

Way to go MacDonalds.

So could you call this a 'You've been McJobbed'

Failing to see the IT angle here....................... Or is there a link between Sex and IT. Not in my house but maybe I missing out on something

Is it just me...

Whenever I look at 'Fayetteville', my brain applies some sort of Americojudgemental(TM) filter and processes it as 'Fattyville'.

Let's focus on the accidental leaving of the phone shall we? In a totally non loony society one would be ridiculed for a) being stupid enough to lose a camera device b) being stupid enough to leave dirty photos on said camera device. Now, in a non-loony court of law, the honus would be on the prosecution to prove that at no point did anyone other than McDonalds staff handle the phone whilst it was left unattended in the restaurant, which of course is utterly impossible and it is through this very logic I deduce that the prosecution will win.

Sounds like that site got quite a few hits, I reckon the pics have been copied and distributed to the nth degree. I hope they bring McD's to their collective knees!

Kudos to El Reg for keeping alive the memory of the Detroit Grand Pubahs and their six nasty minutes of fame.

Would you really want nude pictures of a woman who frequents McDonalds? Unless "beached whales" floats your boat that is, pun not intended.

Paris, obvious reasons involving mobile phones, internet etc.

just asking...

Just because the people responsible are (presumably) McD's staff, how does that make the company liable?

The prosecution stands quite a good chance not because anyone other than the McDimwits could have handled said phone but because they were the only ones who could reasonably have known that those pictures were linked to that name and address. Obviously one can imagine someone who knew the Shermans finding it in the "restaurant" and maliciously posting the pictures, but I would think it likely that that would mean that they and not the McEejits would have given him his phone back.

Should the Shermans have had nothing to fear, one wonders...

Er, anyone who had the phone would have the details.

The photos were from the guy's wife.

Her # would be attached to the messages.

Chances are, the # and address stored on the phone (generally, your wife is in your address book... )

QED.

IT angle: what sort of bozo doesn't password-lock his phone?

@Tony Hoyle - did it occur to you her name, address, and telephone number might just possibly be on the phone along with the pics?

It's a pretty safe bet that any one who picked up the phone had access to her name and phone number at the very least. The idea that only someone who knows her or 'McDonalds staff who were presumably told her details' would be the only ones who'd know that information is, frankly, moronic.

Yokel leaves phone with bluetooth turned on and no security. Geek comes in with phone program that can search other phones who leave their bluetooth unsecured. finds phone left in office, steals pics, and contact details for wife, which happen to include address,

Leave a phone with compromising pictures on it with someone representing someone who can be sued. Get an accomplice to put the pictures on the net, using an Internet Cafe near to where you left the phone. Move house to where you were planning to go all along. Claim whoever offered to look after your phone for a few minutes was responsible and sue them for moving costs and distress.

Or

3 Extortion attempt.

A) Load your wife's nude pics on a website.

B) "Lose" your phone at McD.

C) Try and sue the arse of McD

Mine's the one without a mobile phone in the pocket.

I agree that it is going to be very difficult to prove fault in this case without tracing who supplied the pics to a website to an employee of McD's.

But even if they win, I'm not sure how much compensation the Shermans can expect to be awarded for the public display of her Big Macs and Chicken Sandwich. They'd have to demonstrate damage directly related to this, and a quick troll of the net suggests the pictures weren't widely distributed - even torrent sites don't throw them up.

Mine's the one with the polaroids in the pocket

Their lawyer will have to be able to prove in court that they had possession of the phone the whole time and that some customer didn't in fact have it first and perhaps turn it in to them as "having been left there". Other than that, the judge should rule them and their lawyer numpties and throw the case out of court while forbidding them from ever bringing forth offspring.

Surely Filet-o-Fish would have been more appropriate than Chicken Sandwich?

Mine's the one with the lost-n-found pr0nphone in the pocket.

Just eating at McWorms doesn't automatically make you a fat whale.

I used to eat there every day for years. I weighed 135 pounds at 5 feet 10 inches (62 Kg and 1.78m for you metric types) during that part of my life.

These days, I don't eat at McDs at all, but I now weigh 85Kg (187 pounds.) Is that due to my wife's cooking? No, it is due to the fact that I don't get the exercise these days that I did back then.

Boffin? I guess you've go to be one to figure out that is isn't just what you eat but how much you eat and how much you burn off that determines whether you turn into a whale or not.

…for the sheer amount of stupidity involved. It's not the non-food place's staff's fault that a. the phone was left lying there unguarded for who knows how long until somebody working at the place noticed it, b. that the thing was not protected against unauthorized use in any way, and most of all c. that the missus chose to practically self-publish the pictures. Classic FAIL. Basically, I'd say the couple are trying to cash in on their own ineptitude and stupidity.

Ok, so they lost some naughty pics and had them posted online. Now we are talking a lady who dines out in McDonalds here, so I am guessing not exactly prime internet perv fodder- if they had just put it down as carelessness, and pledged to be more careful in the future this would have just gone away.

But no, they sue. Now the international media has the story, and I am pretty sure the said picture/s is a mere Google image away (I am at work, so despite my own morbid curiosity probably shouldn’t check, but I am sure a fair chunk of readers already have). By now every single person they know will have heard about it.

The fact that money is obviously more important to them than their own dignity, really defeats their already tenuous case.

Um, ok so say the address was in his cell phone. I have about 1,000 contacts in my cell phone. How would you match a name/address/phone number to the naked pictures on my cell phone?

I would argue there is no way you could link address, name and phone number information from my contacts with pictures on my phone if I left it behind and unlocked. You would need additional information/knowledge from a different source.

The reason for the title "a clever way to make money" is because people are likely to take this kind of account at face value and your view seems to confirm this. Maybe you're right that I'm being a bit cynical and this did happen to them and distress them as they alleged, or maybe not. On past form McDonalds have paid a lot of money in lawyers and investigators to defend their reputation even when they were not justified in doing so (search for McLibel). I agree that if this is a scam then it is elaborate, which is why for someone to dream this one up the first time it would be clever. But once having conceived it, executing it would be devastatingly simple and not very difficult to cover the traces, don't you agree ?

It will be interesting to get further reports of this case as it pans out.

I don't think anyone here is really disputing the fact that it probably was one of the shitty little McBeavis's (should that be McBeavii? :P). I think most people's objection is to the fact that there now trying to sue McDonalds! I mean what has McDonalds got to answer for? Maybe the individual franchise manager for not making sure the phone was secured and not left for the McBeavis's to play with, but apart from that, there's not much more that could have been done. Additionally, as has been previously mentioned, showing exactly who took the photos would be pretty damn hard to prove in a court of law i would think. Seems to me like a jumped up lawsuit of the kind only America can produce...

This is sufficiently obvious that it may well have been thought of and used already, but given the rate at which private photos of privates get leaked, I'd like to try to add this to the wonderful English language:

"You've been prned!"

/Paris KNOWS about being prned!

1) leave phone in McDonalds

2) have wife send nude piccies to your phone

3) ???????

4) Profit...

How did you work that out? I was simply pointing out (without swearing or cowardly hiding myself) that in a civilised society a case like this wouldn't stand up in court, if the same thing had happened and no one had handed in the phone then who would they sue? No one, it would simply be their fault for a) keeping the photos (and possibly details) on the phone b) losing the thing in the first place. But we are talking about the land of the free litigation here.

Ever used a smartphone? Those tend to sync with Outlook or other similar tools, which allow to store much more stuff than only an address. Not to mention that these smartphones usually have some "Owner Information" screen where the owner can type in his/her home address if the device ever gets lost. So even if he didn't put his addy in his wife's contact info (after all, they live in the same home!) anyone with the handset would see the pics as being from "Wifey" and also have the bloke's address from the aforementioned "Owner Info" section.

I always push for people to password-lock their devices, but sadly, not every handset supports this (I know my w300 didn't) so there are cases of people who can't do it even if they wanted to do it! However, there are too many stupid people who think password-locking their handsets is overkill, in which case this incident might make them reconsider.

I have a right to carry around pornography in public in private, damnit!