Apple sends takedown notice about customer support email
If you've ever corresponded with Apple Support (or any major customer support outlet, really), you might have seen that little notice at the bottom of the email that says any conversation included "may be privileged and may contain confidential information." Most of the time, that's just a weak move to try and cover up any issues that customer support may cause. But in Apple's case, they sometimes try to take it seriously. David Bowles is a blogger who had an issue with his Thunderbolt display warranty, and when he corresponded with Apple about it, he posted it on the Go Inside magazine website.
Just a little while after that, however, he received an email from Apple's tech support notifying him that they'd seen the "confidential" information posted online, and telling him that he should take it all down, under threat of "further action" (whatever that may be). After discussion with a support manager, Bowles eventually decided just to take down the correspondence from Apple (the rest of the post is still up, and TechCrunch is publishing the takedown notice), and that seems to have calmed the beast for now.
So what does this mean for the rest of us? Probably not much -- Bowles emailed the link of the blog post directly to the tech support crew, so even if Apple is searching the web for its emails being posted, it's unknown if the company would have found Bowles email post at all. And though the takedown email did threaten "further action," it's hard to guess just what that further action would be. Even if Apple really did want to keep these emails from being published (and they probably don't really care, otherwise they would go after TechCrunch), it's hard to say what kind of legal ground they'd be able to stand on.
In other words, much ado about nothing. As for Bowles, there's no news on if his Applecare warranty ever got fixed the way he wanted it, but his blogs sure didn't suffer for the attention.
