HONG KONG - You gotta love technology. 

The first I heard of the story of the iPhone girl was while reading the South China Morning Post on board a flight to Hong Kong this morning, and I feel somewhat embarassed I hadn't heard about it before.  There are loads of stories if one does a simple Google News search for "iPhone girl".

So what's the deal?

A young factory worker in Shenzhen, right next door to Hong Kong, had her photo taken using an iPhone camera at the Foxconn Plant, which builds the iPhones.  The Washington Post picks it up from here:

A British customer named Mark last week turned on his new iPhone to find a number of photos already on the handset. The pictures, which were meant to test the camera but were never deleted and were posted to MacRumors, show a worker at assembly contractor Foxconn's Shenzhen plant posing with a wide smile and making "peace" signs with the gadget while coworkers listen to some banging iTunes tracks.

After the photo was discovered and posted online, a search begin for the girl's identity.  The topic exploded: 

The iPhone Girl meme has picked up steam quickly. As of Thursday morning, there are nearly 250 news stories about her on Google News' main Sci/Tech cluster for iPhone Girl-related articles.

Time will tell if iPhone Girl has the virility of overnight Internet sensations like Chris Crocker of "Leave Britney Alone" fame, much less the staying power of famous ongoing memes like "LOLcats" or "rickrolling".

What iPhone Girl has in common with such memes is that it emerged from a Web community, MacRumors.com, devoted in part to creating such viral phenomena over the Internet (or "Intertubes" to reference another meme that began following the spread of a quote by Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK) describing the Internet as "a series of tubes").

The iPhone girl is now apparently under duress, and has taken a few days off work.  She apparently wants to just go back to her rural hometown and get away from it all.

Moral of the story?  Be careful.  It seems even the most innocuous photos can turn you into a worldwide Internet celebrity.