So this happened to one of my wife's close friends. She worked at a company for a while and was using her company-issued laptop to transfer pictures from her personal phone onto a personal external hard drive for safe-keeping. In doing so she had to upload from her phone to her company laptop, then to her personal hard drive. Then she'd delete the pictures off of the laptop after that.
At some point she began liking her job less and less - hated her boss and her situation. She had a few friends there but overall it was a toxic and stressful work environment. When she was offered a new job somewhere else she took it and had some exit interviews that blasted her boss and the toxic culture as well as wrote up a scathing glassdoor review. So she made many enemies on her way out.
A few months later she heard through a former friend who still worked there that the company did a data recovery on her laptop after she left and they found all the personal pictures that she deleted and presumed were gone. Amongst those pictures was an ass selfie that slipped through the crack (pun intended) during one of the bulk photo transfer processes.
The former work friend at first hinted that many of people had seen the picture as it was a hot topic gossip point around the office for months and that she even heard a rumor someone printed it out and made it into a dart board. My wife's friend and her husband were mortified. And they are a fairly square and prudish couple.
They talked to a lawyer about it, but the lawyer basically said that because the image was uploaded to a company-owned laptop that the data belonged to the company at that point. This was also 10+ years ago so before some of the current laws are in place that might have helped them out. And when my wife's friend mentioned to her work friend that they were talking to a lawyer, the work friend clammed up, walked back the rumors she heard saying they weren't true and ghosted my wife's friend. Probably because she didn't want to get in the middle of anything.
But my wife says that her friend is really bothered by the thought that people she doesn't like have seen or possess an ass selfie of her - even all this time later.
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