Ask AE: Emergency iPhone Photo Special

We received this desperate cry for help from iPhone user ‘John’ this morning and thought we’d better share it with you as quickly as possible. I think it provides a salutary lesson to all of us.

Q: I’ve been reading about that iPhone photo e-mail problem [we think he means this one, where the iPhone attaches random photos to e-mail messages and puts them in the 'Sent' folder, all without the user's permission]. Well, the same thing happened to me, only far, far worse. As far as I can tell, what my iPhone did was download some pornographic images from the internet and then paste my head onto the man’s body and the head of Magda, our au pair, onto the woman. And that’s not all. It also geotagged the images with the location of the Premier Inn on the B3183 just outside Exeter, and set the file’s creation dates to a weekend when Magda was visiting her parents in Poznań and I was at a sales conference in Norwich. Now my wife’s found the photos and she simply refuses to believe my perfectly logical explanation. (She doesn’t really know that much about computers, you see.) Could you help me out by explaining to her that this is a known fault with the iPhone software? You’re a well-respected Mac news site. She’d believe you. Oh, and has this happened to other people? Do you think we could maybe all get together and start one of those class-action lawsuit things against Apple?

Æ: No, but I suggest you get yourself a lawyer anyway.