A Los Angeles woman is suing Sprint for invasion of privacy, infliction of emotional distress and identity theft after several photos of her engaged in sexual acts were posted to her Facebook profile from a phone that she traded in to a Sprint store in April of last year. The lawsuit claims that an employee at the Sprint refurbishing factory logged in to her Facebook profile using the application on her old phone and posted them.
“It was very embarrassing, shocking, traumatizing,” said Mike Kazerouni, the woman’s lawyer. “I think it’s disgusting. I can’t fathom why someone would want to put up intimate pictures of someone they’ve never met on their Facebook page.”
The woman, named J. Johnson in court documents, says that Sprint promised her phone would be wiped clean when it was sent to a factory in Louisville to be refurbished. However, she believes someone at the plant posted the pictures instead.
Both the woman and the man pictured in the images are suing Sprint, and the woman’s attorney says that both have received rude and harassing comments since the images were posted.
“They don’t know how many people have seen it. But just based on the comments [on Facebook], it was a lot of people,” Kazerouni said. “It’s been fairly traumatizing for both of them.”
This incident is a good reminder to take responsibility for your privacy. Two simple actions could have avoided this fiasco:
- Erase all of the data on the device yourself. Restoring the device to factory settings is a good way to delete personal data.
- End all active sessions in your Facebook security options. This would have logged the device out of Facebook.