14 DAY TRIAL // If you’re doing business with Sprint, consider switching to another carrier. Fast. The American telecommunications holding company recorded an incident last week that is grounds for filing a lawsuit.
A woman going by the name of Mary Biondi bought an iPhone 6 from Sprint last week and wanted it activated. The staffer in charge with these services didn’t do a very good job, to say the least.
Loaded up someone else’s iCloud account
“[The employee] just said, ‘I am really sorry. I did something really bad and someone else’s information is on your phone’,” Biondi says, according to KCRA.
That’s not the worst bit. The employee who made the mistake let Biondi leave the store with that person’s information on her new iPhone. She was told to head to the Apple Store and have the device wiped clean, but the Sprint staffer had no guarantee that she’d do that.
Apparently, Sprint wishes to offer the same setup services as Apple does, only the former fails to train its staffers properly.
“I am still so shocked that they actually just let me leave with the phone and whatever information -- it was somebody else’s,” Biondi said.
Major security concern
According to the report, the man whose iCloud account trickled onto Biondi’s iPhone was told that “there was a computer file that was supposed to be deleted over the weekend, but never was.”
Imagine if that was your iCloud account that Sprint loaded up on someone else’s iPhone. Would you be able to sleep at night knowing that someone, somewhere can see your personal photos and videos, as well as access social networks posing as you?
What’s more worrying is that Sprint is allowed to keep iCloud accounts that they can just “forget” to delete. It’s not immediately clear how the mix-up happened, but it’s pretty obvious that Sprint’s services pose very high risks for the customer’s security.
iCloud getting only bad press lately
It’s pretty obvious that, whenever Apple does something bad, everyone is up in arms that their services are unreliable. As the present report indicates, it’s not always Apple’s fault that these things happen. Half of the time it’s actually the user’s fault that their account got hacked or their photos got leaked.
Apple has very clear instructions on how to preserve the integrity and security of an iCloud account, but few people follow those tips. Throw the carriers into the mix, count the number of iPhones, Macs, and iPads out there, and it becomes clear why iCloud is high on a list of cloud services that you supposedly can’t trust.