back to article Aussie Aussie Aussie, oi oi oi you, you're fired: Apple sacks staff secretly snapping shoppers

Apple fired staff from one of its Australian stores this week after they secretly snapped and shared photos of fellow workers and customers. The Brisbane Courier-Mail [paywalled] reports that employees at the city's Carindale mall Apple store were using iGizmos to take pictures of women and sharing the images among themselves …

  1. Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

    Stupid. Serves them right.

    But TBH this sort of thing will not stop.

    If you can put a PIN/password/fingerprint/pattern lock on any folder with sensitive data, best do it straightaway to prevent ne'er-do-wells from peeking at your pics.

    Or load your phone/device full of fugly and horrible smut which'll burn said perp's eyes out... but then you have to explain to $wife why those ugly picshers are on your device...

    Password-protected folder is better.

    1. Dan 55 Silver badge

      I don't know about iPhones, but if you hand in a Mac for repair the form you fill in on a tablet they give you asks you to give them your user password.

      1. Alister

        if you hand in a Mac for repair the form you fill in on a tablet they give you asks you to give them your user password.

        Well, yeah, otherwise they can't do a lot with it, can they?

        There isn't some secret Apple Genius login which gives them access to all Macs, they need your password to get into it.

        <rant>

        This isn't just an Apple thing, I've lost count of the number of users who hand me a tablet / phone / laptop to fix and wander off without telling me their PIN / Password. If I can't get into it, I can't fix it!

        </rant>

        1. Dan 55 Silver badge
          Facepalm

          1. Macs have very separate user directories and happily boot off external devices.

          2. Is that really necessary if it's a hardware problem?

          Punter: Computer turns on but no display. Symptoms concur with notice buried^Wposted on Apple website which says that the video card is fried. Your website has tested my Mac's serial number and said it could be in an affected batch.

          Insufferable genius: I will deign to say that you, the customer, may (but only may) be right in this case. Please fill this form in on my shiny iPad.

          Insufferable genius' tablet: User password please.

      2. Lee D Silver badge

        Then Apple users are even sillier than I thought. They should be asked to REMOVE the passcode before any work takes place, or as soon as the device appears functional again (e.g. screen repair). Even if that means by some Apple debugging technique that requires a special cert only issued to Apple repair shops AND the user passcode entered over a USB cable.

        However, if you're expecting your data to ever be recovered, from any company, you are going to need to give that company some kind of access to it. At that point, you need to be able to trust them. And I would trust Apple store staff about as much as the local PC World.

        Unless someone invents a way to encrypt user files and applications completely separately so that you can just transfer "user_files.encrypted" off the broken machine and onto a new machine and then get the user to put in their code on the new device at their convenience, then there's no other solution.

        I must say a thousand times a day that I don't KNOW people's passwords. I just have access to their files or devices. I can't log in as any user, except by resetting their password which is auditable, noticeable, affects THEIR use of the machines AND I can't put it back how it was before I changed the password. I can impersonate their user account from mine (auditable), and I can access the storage medium they have stored their files on. But I can't "be" their user or see their password. Even on iPads. I can't remove the passcode or find out what it is, but I can bypass it by supervising their machine beforehand.

        But if you want to repair a random device that involves either resetting passwords (potentially wiping out encrypted files, e.g. Bitlocker), or the user's passwords. NTPASSWD, for instance, wipes out Bitlocker encrypted files for that user when you use it. Any other way in requires a password or hacking equivalent to giving out your password and data.

        The solution is to stop building machines that throw user files over several folders, all over internal and external storage, mix them all together for every user (e.g. Program Files, ProgramData, etc.), with no easy way to transfer that configuration to another machine without interfering with passwords, being able to read or wipe out encrypted data and its keys, and that works from any version/machine to any similar version/machine.

        But we're still building systems where user files on a single user laptops are stored in C:\Users, C:\ProgramData, C:\Program Files, C:\Program Files (x86), etc. but you can't transfer most of that to another random machine without causing immense amounts of reinstalling, reconfiguring, flat-out crashes and non-working parts, etc.

        It's not even true on Linux any more. /etc/ is almost completely non-transferable and picking apart the bits that aren't is a nightmare. /home is a good start for individual user's however. But then you get into /usr/ /usr/local/ etc. and it all falls apart again.

        We seriously need to move to a system where every program is entirely self-contained and portable, and every user home self-contained and portable, and the combination of both on any machine makes them "just work". Our "bodge" of the moment is VM's which just carry all the above in one file and then have multiple of them running on some system with the exact same problem.

        1. Dieter Haussmann

          "Then Apple users are even sillier than I thought. They should be asked to REMOVE the passcode before any work takes place,"

          - Impossible due to Filevault encryption, the password is required BEFORE boot to unlock the hard disk. They should reenable Guest login (which is enabled by default) or create a new admin user this will give the option of rebooting to a Guest partition and allowing access to web-browser, wifi settings etc....

          Internal storage access is only neccessary for software problems, technicians should boot from their own external troubleshooting disk for testing hardware and running tests.

        2. druck Silver badge
          Happy

          Lee D wrote:

          We seriously need to move to a system where every program is entirely self-contained and portable
          That would be RISC OS then.

        3. Eddy Ito

          We seriously need to move to a system where every program is entirely self-contained and portable

          Do you mean PortableApps? I believe it still has the problem of shared library file replication but we've all known dependency hell at one point or another and storage space is cheap so maybe it's a wash.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            "...shared library file replication"

            Do you mean space wise, or for runtime? Not sure if an app can be considered portable in that manner if it doesn't come hardwired with the required lib modules.

            1. Eddy Ito

              Yeah, I guess I couldn't think of how to put it well. Normally they'd be all the shared libraries, e.g. the dll files typically in the System32 or SysWOW64 folders on Windows, but since the applications need to be a self contained package you get each one carrying along it's own bag of bits which may be unnecessarily duplicated by several applications because they aren't shared. Again, I'm not sure that really matters given terabyte capacity USB thumb drives.

              1. Dan 55 Silver badge

                Mac apps are self-contained, they don't usually have shared resources.

      3. Fitz_

        "if you hand in a Mac for repair the form you fill in on a tablet they give you asks you to give them your user password."

        I've never been asked for a password for Apple hardware repair, but then I am the sort of person who takes an image of the drive and zeros it before taking it in.

  2. Allan George Dyer
    Paris Hilton

    No trouble getting a new job...

    I've heard the NSA has positions for this skill-set.

  3. xeroks

    Not sure what the problem is

    That kind of thing is clearly just Locker Room Talk™

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Pint

    3.5mm jack offs

    El Reg has invented themselves a new term for Apple employees, I see!

  5. the Jim bloke

    Pics

    .... or it didn't happen

  6. unwarranted triumphalism

    It's still Apple's fault.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Apple believe in treating everyone equally

    that includes the hands at the assembly line in the exotic land of the China people. Quick, give them a 10,000% "payrice"...

  8. adam payne

    Techies looking at files on peoples PCs that have gone in for repair is nothing new and it seems every year we seem to hear of someone else getting caught doing it.

    How many people do it and don't get caught?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Thing is, that's how they caught Gary Glitter.

  9. thomas k

    iPerv

    = iFired

  10. Fruit and Nutcase Silver badge
    Facepalm

    Only in Australia?

    One of the other employees said that similar photo-snooping rings could be operating in other Australian stores.

    Shirley not?

  11. JJKing

    Sometimes you need to check an image

    Replaced a video card in a desktop, clicked in Pictures, selected a random image to see if the card was working and up popped some porn. Since it belonged to the Principal at a catholic school I reported it and later discovered it was child porn when plod arrived on my doorstep with a search warrant.

    Sometimes you need to check an image or document for testing. Now I have a write protected USB stick with my own pure as the driven snow images and never click on anything without a witness present. Not pleasant shit to go through.

  12. cd / && rm -rf *
    Happy

    "3.5mm jack-offs"

    Gold. Absolute gold.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      More like gold-plated. ;)

POST COMMENT House rules

Not a member of The Register? Create a new account here.

  • Enter your comment

  • Add an icon

Anonymous cowards cannot choose their icon

Other stories you might like