SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
The OC Weekly reports on the case United States of America v. Mark A. Rettenmaier in which a California doctor is charged with knowingly possessing child pornography. The defendant came under investigation after he brought his computer to Best Buy's Geek Squad for service. A technician there discovered an image of an unclothed girl (which the defence asserts is not child pornography) in unallocated space of the computer's hard drive.
According to the defence attorney,
[...] records show "FBI and Best Buy made sure that during the period from 2007 to the present, there was always at least one supervisor who was an active informant."
The OC Weekly story says that:
[...] the company's repair technicians routinely searched customers' devices for files that could earn them $500 windfalls as FBI informants.
Best Buy has issued a statement which says:
"Best Buy and Geek Squad have no relationship with the FBI. From time to time, our repair agents discover material that may be child pornography, and we have a legal and moral obligation to turn that material over to law enforcement. We are proud of our policy and share it with our customers before we begin any repair.
"Any circumstances in which an employee received payment from the FBI is the result of extremely poor individual judgment, is not something we tolerate and is certainly not a part of our normal business behavior.
"To be clear, our agents unintentionally find child pornography as they try to make the repairs the customer is paying for. They are not looking for it. Our policies prohibit agents from doing anything other than what is necessary to solve the customer's problem so that we can maintain their privacy and keep up with the volume of repairs."
Additional coverage:
- later OC Weekly story
- BBC News
- Engadget
- Washington Post
- Washington Post
- ZDnet
- Network World
- RTTNews.com via NASDAQ
- SFgate
Related: How Best Buy's Computer-Wiping Error Turned Me into an Amateur Blackhat
(Score: 2) by q.kontinuum on Saturday January 14 2017, @06:26PM
Good luck assembling your own laptop... If you really know a shop selling suitable parts, please, post a link. I have my home-partition encrypted and bank on that encryption being save enough. I'd never go to tech-support for sw issues, only hw. Therefore if they need to boot, they can use their own USB/DVD/CD, no access to my home partition.
Of course the tmp folder might still contain private information... should probably put that on an encrypted partition as well.
Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum
(Score: 1) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Saturday January 14 2017, @06:49PM
They be like: "Your Windows installation was corrupted, so we replaced it. that will be $30 for the Windows license please"
(Score: 2) by q.kontinuum on Saturday January 14 2017, @08:09PM
Unlikely. Since I keep a backup on usb-disk, I'd not worry too much, but I'd give my software to repair and they'd actually delete /overwrite my data, they would be sued.
Luckily here in Europe most people did hear about Linux, and people working 'in IT' even more so.
Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum