The Geek Squad at Best Buy Electronics stores is supposed to help customers with their
computers. But some geeks on the geek squad have instead been helping themselves
to their customers’ computers - most specifically to porn files found on their customers’ hard drives.
In a self-styled sting that lasted about three months, Consumerist.com, the blog for consumer awareness where “shoppers bite back”, liberally seasoned a
computer hard drive with porn files, loaded it with recording
software, and then took the computer to several different Best Buy stores for routine servicing. In most cases, everything was as it should be, but in at least one notable case a geek squad member found the porn files and copied them over to his own thumb drive (issued by employer Best Buy .com).
Explains the Consumerist, “To investigate claims by current and former Geek Squad techies … we loaded a computer with porn and rigged it to make a video of itself. We captured every cursor movement, every program opened, every file accessed. Everything that the user saw and did, we recorded.
We took it to less than a dozen Best Buy Geek Squads and asked them to perform simple tasks, like installing iTunes. Most places were fine, sometimes doing the job right on the counter, sometimes even for free.
Then we caught one well-seasoned Geek Squad Agent
copying personal and pornographic images and video from our computer to his company-issued thumb drive …”
The moral here is probably “don’t bring your computer in for service if you have files on it that you consider sensitive or private,” although of course there is (and we should be able to have) an expectation of privacy when you bring your computer in for service. (Of course the latter does not hold if you have child pornography on your hard drive, in which case the technician may be
required by law to turn you in (although that didn’t stop some folks from getting up in arms when
a computer technician at the Quidnunc computer repair shop in Seattle turned in a customer for exactly that reason).
You can view the Consumerist video of the guy swiping their porn files
here.
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