The IT Nerd

If you look at my about page, I’ve been in this industry for over 20 years. Whether I’ve worked on a help desk or in a computer repair shop, I tried to do my job as efficiently as possible. That means getting the problem that the user has fixed and getting out as quickly as possible. That does NOT include going through the users hard drive looking for porn. So it sickens me to read about the Geek Squad’s ongoing problem with it’s employees going through the hard drives of of its customers looking for porn to copy. Violet Blue of the The San Francisco Chronicle wrote about it yesterday, but this story has been floating around for a while. What kills me is the absolute denial from The Geek Squad, as if blaming bloggers and anyone else who talks about this is the way to solve this problem.

Here’s why you should care about this: These jokers are going through your hard drives looking at your private information. They could be your banking records, or your will, or anything else that isn’t porn related. In this age of identity theft, that should scare anyone who takes their computer in for repair at their local computer shop. So it’s not just about porn, it’s about your right to privacy. To be fair there are likely other companies that do the same thing, but this is the one company who has the spotlight on them at the moment. Avoid them until they decide to wise up and deal with their issues.

I’ll be posting a “How to get your computer fixed” guide shortly so that you don’t end up having something like this happen to you. Watch for it.

This entry was posted on February 22, 2008 at 2:18 pm and is filed under Commentary with tags Geek Squad, Porn, Privacy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.