Hundreds of Nude Photos Bomb Teen with New Smartphone

A metro Detroit family wants more answers about how hundreds of sexually explicit photos ended up on their 14-year-old daughter’s smartphone – a Christmas gift they said turned into a disaster. (Photo via Creative Commons)

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A metro Detroit teen can’t unsee the the images seared into her mind when she used her new smartphone, a late Christmas gift from her dad, last week:

Hundreds of nude photos of a couple in sexually explicit scenes that, as a 14-year-old, Molly Hall is too young to see in a movie theater.

“I saw the new stuff and I was like, ‘What is this?’ “ the teen told WJBK-TV. “It was gross, I was very mortified.”

Molly was one of the last kids in her group to get a smartphone as her parents tried to shield her from the darker side of social technology, said her mom, Lindsey Rusk.

“So many kids now have smartphones and … I felt bad that she didn’t get one until she was 14,” Rusk said. “But now, I’m like, ‘Oh, was that really a good choice?’

“You try to shield your kids from that crap,” she said, “and it just pops up.

“I’m so ticked off,” she said, repeating for emphasis, “so ticked off.”

Molly’s dad, Donovan Hall, bought a new phone at a Sprint retailer in Davison in December, but sent the device back because it wasn’t working. A refurbished Sprint HTC One M8 phone – not the new phone he had originally paid for – arrived last week

“This was supposed to be a Christmas present, not a disaster,” he said.

Related:

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• Rochester Area Teens Could Face Felonies for Sexting

Sprint is investigating to determine how the explicit private pictures ended up in the hands of a 14-year-old, the TV station reported. Molly’s parents said they’re considering legal action against the wireless provider.

“My daughter, I feel like her innocence was taken away because of this,” Donovan Hall said. “That’s not something they can give back to her.”

The alleged carelessness of the company also robbed the couple pictured of their privacy, he said.

“It was a couple together, it was their personal photos,” Hall said. “And they don’t want their personal photos out there.”

Intimate Photos at Center of Lawsuit Against Sprint

This isn’t the first time Sprint’s refurbished phones have ended up at the center of a legal battle. Last winter, a Los Angeles woman filed suit against the wireless giant alleging a worker at a Sprint factory in Kentucky found her intimate couples photos and posted two of them on Facebook. The lawsuit plaintiff, who sued for invasion of privacy and identity theft, said she had been promised the phone would be wiped clean.

Deleting your dirty little secrets isn’t as simple as doing a factory reset, though.

Last year, the Internet security software developer Avast bought 20 previously owned Android smartphones on eBay that supposedly had been wiped clean, but contained more than 40,000 personal photos, emails and text messages. In some cases, the sellers’ identities were compromised.

“The amount of personal data we retrieved from the phones was astounding,” Jude McColgan, president of Avast Mobile, told ComputerWorld. “We found everything from a filled-out loan form to more than 250 selfies of what appear to be the previous owner’s manhood.

“The take-away,” McColgan said, ”is that even deleted data on your used phone can be recovered unless you completely overwrite it.”

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