When you need to drop off your tech devices for a repair, how confident are you that they won’t be snooped on?
CBC’s Marketplace took smartphones and laptops to repair stores across Ontario — including large chains Best Buy and Mobile Klinik — and found that in more than half of the documented cases, technicians accessed intimate photos and private information not relevant to the repair.
Marketplace dropped off devices at 20 stores, ranging from small independent shops to medium-sized chains to larger national chains, after installing monitoring software on the devices. In total, 16 stores were recorded. (At four stores, the tracking software didn’t log anything, or the stores didn’t appear to turn the devices on.)
Technicians at nine stores accessed private data, including one technician who not only viewed photos but copied them onto a USB key.
This being so common is creepy, but I feel like I just read/heard about a case where some pedo was recently arrested because a tech found CSAM on his phone during a repair and reported him. I really value privacy, but in that one case I’m glad the tech got nosey. I’m a bit intoxicated right now and cannot remember where I heard about this, but probably some true crime podcast or YouTube channel. I’ll update with a source if I remember.
EDIT here’s one, but there are dozens of cases like this if you search https://kmph.com/news/local/tech-repair-shop-helps-arrest-customer-possessing-child-pornography-in-fresno
The thing is, it’s really hard to be consistent on beliefs, especially in cases like this where it might sound unfavorable.
If you say you’re against surveillance and spying on devices, people will generally agree that’s a good thing. But this is an example of privacy invasion, and is justified because they caught CSAM, so it must be good, right?
Well in the big picture of things, this would be setting a precedent. Where they can justify these things because they can find and stop these things. This tends to lead to the “think of the children!” fallacy. Legislators are actively using this argument to push anti-privacy measures like breaking encryption so they can stop this. So it unfortunately means, respect privacy, or allow these things to go unchecked.
Freedom comes at a price, and you gotta stay consistent even if it lets bad guys get away with things. You can justify a lot of fascism in the name of stopping the bad guys, since obviously it’s not a good look to defend those actions.
It’s one thing to merely stumble across someone’s private content on a PC while working on it, and quite another to actively seek it out and make a copy like the guys in the article were caught doing.
Thank you! I worked at Staples as an Easy Tech (2006) and we were required to search desktops for pedophile materials so we could report them to authorities when found. I never found any myself but that was policy back then.