[sugar and spice]

Bottom line: if the guy with the lost cell phone talked to the McDonald's manager, the manager said they'd found the phone and would hold onto it for a few days until the guy came to claim it, and then he let his employees have it instead and the pictures got out--then yes, McDonald's bears some legal responsibility here. But the victim would have to be able to prove that the phone was, at some point, in the manager's possession (or at the very least in some employee's possession), and I'm not sure that's true. To me, it sounds like a case where the guy left his phone behind, the manager never knew about it, and now the victim is trying to pin the blame on somebody else so he can make some money off of it.

The gray area here is if an employee really did find the phone, take it home, and distribute the pictures (without the manager ever having knowledge of the phone or the pictures' existence). Is this McDonald's fault or just the individual employee's? (Well, it's the individual's, but McDonald's can probably still get sued for it.)

Most restaurants have specific rules about employees turning over left-behind belongings to the manager as soon as they find them. If you get caught taking any of that stuff home--even, like, a pair of plastic sunglasses that have been in the lost-and-found for six months--you'll likely be fired. Any well-trained manager knows the possible consequences of not protecting any belongings that are left behind and brought to their attention. Then again, this is McDonald's, who allows 18-year-olds to become managers, so their maturity may be suspect. But in general, the idea that a manager would turn over a phone like this to his employees is pretty ludicrous. They know that's likely to end in a lawsuit. Even going through the phone to look for pictures could set them up for a lawsuit, so they'd probably avoid doing that unless the phone's owner called and they were given permission to look through it for identification purposes. I'm surprised at places here that allowed their employees to call names on cell phones that were left behind, because at every corporate place I've worked, that was a big potential violation of privacy. (The independent places worried less because they weren't rich enough that anybody would bother suing them over something that small.)