After game designer and writer Jane McGonigal sent her Pixel 5a to Google for repair, someone allegedly took it and hacked into her device. This is at least the second similar report in a few weeks. McGonigal detailed the situation on Twitter on Saturday and advised other users not to send their phones to the company for repairs.
In October, McGonigal sent her broken phone to an official Pixel repair center in Texas. She later posted on Twitter that Google said it had never received the phone, but in the following weeks, she was charged for the replacement of the device.
In addition, McGonigal disclosed that FedEx tracking information showed that the device had arrived at the agency a few weeks ago. Late Friday night-a few hours after she said she finally received a refund for the device-someone seemed to use this missing phone to pass a two-factor authentication check and log in to several of her accounts, including her Dropbox, Gmail and Google Drive.
This activity triggered several email security alerts for McGonigal’s backup account. However, she speculates that whoever owns the phone may use it to access her backup email address, and then forward any security alerts to her spam folder. The photos they opened were photos of me wearing a swimsuit, sports bra, fitted skirt, and stitched up after surgery, McGonigal wrote. They deleted the Google security notification from my backup email account.
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Yeah, don’t send your Google phone in for warranty repair/replacement. As has happened with others, last night someone used it to log into my gmail, Drive, photos backup email account, dropbox, and I can see from activity logs they opened a bunch of selfies hoping to find nudes
— Jane McGonigal (@avantgame) December 4, 2021
Google spokesperson Alex Moriconi stated in a statement emailed to The Verge: We are investigating this claim. It is unclear whether the device may have been intercepted in a repair facility or in transit or in Someone’s hands. Google’s official repair instructions recommend backing up and then deleting the device before sending it. However, as Jane McGonigal pointed out, this is either difficult or impossible.
This situation reminds us that there are safety concerns whenever we hand over equipment to others for repairs, and unfortunately, there are precedents for this activity. In June of this year, after maintenance technicians posted a nude photo of a woman to Facebook, Apple paid her millions of dollars. Apple recently stated that it will start selling DIY repair kits, which will give users the opportunity to repair their phones themselves or at least let someone they trust complete tasks instead of sending or throwing their phones to Apple’s official retail stores.
For Pixel phones, users can choose to obtain official services by mail, or obtain local services through authorized suppliers in some other countries. In the United States, Google has a partnership with uBreakiFix franchise stores.