Computer Repair Shops Rifle Through Customer Data

An investigation carried out by Sky News uncovered severe abuses of trust in computer repair shops around London. Technicians purposely misdiagnosed a simple problem in order to charge more, while others rifled through or copied documents clearly marked as private.

Sky News reporters took a brand-new laptop with Windows installed on it, loosened a memory module so that the operating system would not boot anymore, and took it at six different computer repair shops, some of them being pretty renowned. In addition to the easy-to-fix technical problem, the laptop was rigged with keylogging software and the web camera was set to start recording once Windows booted. A folder called "private" containing photos of a woman in bikini and a document comprising fake login details for email, social networking and online banking accounts was also planted.

The conclusions were that computer repair shop employees could seriously abuse the trust that customers placed in them, most of the times without even realizing. A single repair shop from the ones investigated treated the problem professionally by identifying it, addressing it and even charging no money for the simple job.

Three of the shops said that a new motherboard was required, after they had actually discovered the real problem and fixed it, thus showing a clear intention of deceiving the customers. For one of the shops, the undercover reporter refused to pay for a new motherboard and the technicians soldered the memory-bus pins together.

But the abuse goes much deeper and probably becomes more illegal too. At two of the shops, employees rifled through the personal pictures and even called in other colleagues to watch them together. One particular creepy technician even copied the photos into a folder on his memory stick, called "mamma jammas." He then went on and tried to use the login credentials found in the private folder, giving up after five minutes of trying to access the accounts that, obviously, weren't his.

The results of this investigation raise serious questions about how less technical users should go about fixing their computers while protecting their privacy at the same time. If the problem is with the hardware, one could plug the HDD out and leave the shop to repair the computer using their own hard drive for tests. However, this implies a novice user figuring out that the problem is hardware-related and that they know how to remove an HDD, which can be difficult, especially for laptops.

In order to overcome these issues, it is better to ask the technician to inspect the computer and diagnose the problem right in front of you, if possible. If they determine that the problem is not HDD-related, ask them to remove the hard disk and give it to you. If the problem is software-related (operating system), you might be forced to leave the HDD, in which case it is better to move all the personal documents to a folder and encrypt it with specific software in advance.

Even with all these precautions, it is impossible to cover all scenarios. Moving browsing history, saved-form information, locally stored emails, etc., to the encrypted folder, and then deleting them from their usual location might be too much of a challenge for the less knowledgeable. Because of this, it is always a good idea to call a friend who is more computer-literate to assist you with such tasks.