If you’ve ever watched the film One Hour Photo, you may’ve soured on the idea of sending photos to a pharmacy or specialty printing store to be processed by someone you’ve never met, especially if you’re leery of folks taking unsolicited ganders at your private pictures.
And it’s not like folks who work in the photo section are shy about highlighting some of the pictures that they’ve seen either. One redditor who worked as a Walgreens Photo specialist admits that they’ve “seen some sh*t” during their tenure in the photo department, writing that they’ve been exposed to tons of nude and lewd images, to photographs of people of all ages pooping on the floor.
A TikToker named Liv (@oliviadelta9), who also works in the Walgreens photo department, shared a strange customer order of her own: 89 text message screenshots printed on photo paper.
She showed the print-outs in a viral clip on the popular social media platform that’s accrued over 450,000 likes, and many commenters who saw her video joked that they wouldn’t have been able to stop themselves from reading the text messages printed by the Walgreens customer.
@oliviadelta9 ♬ Reeses PB Fluck – Stefan Johnson
Liv lip-syncs someone else saying, “What in the Reese’s peanut butter f*ck is going on,” as she shows printed screenshots of what appears to be text conversations from a Walgreen’s customer.
One commenter who saw her clip said that they too worked in a photo department (at Staples) and became privy to the secret lives of customers as well: “I worked copy and print at staples for years and I always got the tea.”
Another quipped that they would have taken the time to read through all of the messages: “‘Your order is taking a while to process please allow an extra hour before pickup!’”
“I would read every. single. one,” another joked.
It seemed like there were a lot of folks who didn’t trust themselves to not take a gander at the secret lives of photo customers: “I couldn’t be trusted in this position lollll I’m too damn nosy”
In a Reddit post uploaded to the site’s r/Bakersfield sub, a user with the handle @Throwawaywalgreen shared instances where they came across photo department employees in clear violation of the store’s customer privacy rules. The individual’s “former friend” posted a nude photo of a woman they had kept for themselves and pinned up beside their bed and urged him the destroy it, but they aren’t sure if they ever did.
They said that they posted about the incident to urge folks to never print sensitive materials or pictures they aren’t comfortable with strangers seeing: “This post is meant as a warning to all who get their photos printed at Walgreens. Don’t bring anything you would be uncomfortable with being stolen or copied, for example nudes, photos of children, or surgical photos.”
Laws pertaining to photo printing at retailers’ photography departments usually focus on copyright images, i.e. if you don’t own the usage rights to a picture, employees may tell you they cannot legally physically replicate the image for you. While it’s unreasonable to expect that employees of a store wouldn’t look at the images customers ask them to print, copying data to store on personal devices, i.e. stealing data is another story. Unfortunately, tech workers have been caught doing just that in the past.
Walgreens has delineated its privacy practices here.
The Daily Dot has reached out to Walgreens via email and Liv via TikTok comment for further information on its usage practices pertaining to photo customer image/user data.
