Gizmodo has published an amazing story about shenanigans inside Apple stores. Somehow Gizmodo got current and former Apple store employees to dish about the naughty stuff that goes on. The list includes breaking stuff just for fun, stealing, sexual harassment, plain old consensual sex (sometimes inside the store), fraud and drugs.
But the grossest, creepiest thing:
Geniuses looking through people’s hard drives for nasty personal photos, collecting them and sometimes even posting them on the Internet.
Women, Beware
Reporter Sam Biddle writes: “If a woman walked in, her stuff would get digged through, shared and laughed at. Team bonding. Your iPhone camera roll isn’t safe.”
Quote from one tipster: “I used to be an Apple store Expert and the most common practice by Geniuses was going through young girls computers and emailing their private photos to themselves so they could have them for personal use.”
Another Apple employee tells a tale of a girl who brought in a computer with a broken display. They took it out back to fix it, went through her photos, found naked pictures she’d taken of herself, and “added that to the collection.”
Biddle sums up:
“There are – and always will be – miscreants in every job… But when emails arrived in droves repeating the same naughty phenomena, you have to wonder why a company whose rep is as sterling as Apple’s seems to have such a pattern of internal havoc.”
One tipster who claimed to be a former Apple employee who had opened retail stores in North America and Asia wrote: “The corruption within Apple goes straight to the top… Apple is fracturing from the inside out.”
It’s an amazing, scary, must-read story with lots of screen grabs, emails, documents and photos. See the full story here.
Image courtesy of Reuters.