Four Palo Alto teenagers raised in the heart of Silicon Valley got the scare of their lives when they thought they might be banished from all Apple stores worldwide, for life.
Their crime, the teens said, was downloading a third-party car racing game onto iPhones at Apple’s University Avenue store in Palo Alto last weekend. For that, the two Palo Alto High School students and two recent graduates said they were detained 2 1/2 hours at the store and permanently banned by management.
“I can’t walk down University Avenue without going in there,” said Paly senior Daniel Fukuba, who camped out for the first iPhones last year. Fukuba, who works at a local start-up when not in school, said he and two friends – junior Eric Vicenti and Paly alum Noah Rogers – had some time to kill before meeting up with Paly alum Anjay Patel on Saturday, so they headed over to the Apple store. Showing off the capabilities of the iPhone to Vicenti, Fukuba downloaded a car racing game called “Raging Thunder” – a third-party application created by the Swedish company Polarbits – onto the store phone.
“We thought that it was completely harmless,” Vicenti said. When an employee stopped by and asked what they were doing, Fukuba told him they were “playing around with the phones.” Rogers, who said he worked for the Palo Alto Apple store during the holiday season, said employees are trained to restore the iPhones and computers each night so any downloaded applications would be erased before the next day. “All you have to do is plug it in a laptop to restore it to normal,” he said. The employee did not seem alarmed, but a few minutes later a manager came over and asked whether they needed help, Fukuba said. He replied that they were doing fine, and shortly after Patel arrived the group left the store. Patel said he had spent less than five minutes in the store, doing nothing but checking his Facebook page and barely chatting with his friends. “I may have said one or two words to them,” he said.
But the group had time to talk over the next 2 1/2 hours. “We’re halfway down the block when the manager comes running out and tells us to stop right there,”‘ Fukuba said. The students were ordered to return to the store, where a security guard and the manager called police, Vicenti said. Sgt. Sandra Brown confirmed that the store called the Palo Alto Police Department and an officer responded, but made no arrests. She said the store issued the teens an “admonishment” to leave the store, but police did not force them out. After being lectured by the manager on the dangers of “hacking” into the phones, the teens were photographed and told their pictures were being sent to all Apple stores “so they’d be on the lookout for us,” Rogers said.
Never, ever, cross an Apple store employee, lest ye too shall be banned for life.
