A young female customer from Ningbo city, northeast of Zhejiang province, sent her iPhone to an Apple franchise store for repairing. The naughty repairman has recovered all her deleted naked photos while fixing the phone.
The repairman has made copies of those photos and loaded them onto a sample device which display in the store. The young lady was shocked when seeing her naked photos on the display iPhone as she came back to pick up her own iPhone. The woman’s boyfriend rushed to the store for explanation and alerted the police …
The incident has sparked a heated discussion among Chinese netizens, most of them questioned why the deleted pictures in the iPhone could be recovered. According to IT professionals, it is easy for a computer expert to recover deleted data using recovery software, because those data are still saved inside the files system. Therefore, if the sotware can find the right path, the deleted files can be retrieved. For another explanation, it might be the cause of iCloud application which allows users to upload data to a server. With the right username and password, the deleted data can be reloaded from the server. The naive woman might uploaded her photos to the server and her username and password were used by the repairman to retrieve the deleted pictures.
Experts are warning smart phone users to keep secret of their usernames and passwords and turn off the data uploading services such as iCloud before they send their phones for repair works. Although there are many ways to retriev delete files inside the iPhone, people are advised where possible to watch over the staff throughout the repairing process to avoid such unscrupulous practices. In the meantime, local police are investigating to find if the repairman recovered the photos intentionally.