Originally Posted by
cl-scott
I worked in a retail chain's repair depot for about 2 years, and while I generally would make a point to try and respect the privacy of people whose computers I was working on, there were plenty of times where people would have things on the desktop that were clearly pirated MP3 albums and you'd see an icon for something like FrostWire as well.
There were also times when I had to test something like video playback. Where I worked the top management was too cheap to pay for anything other than unreliable cellular Internet connections (and I'm sure that will tip off some as to which outfit I am talking about, I would just ask you keep it to yourself). So YouTube was out, getting a DVD or something from the other part of the warehouse was more or less out of the question, which left me with having to look through the owner's files to try and find some kind of video file.
It really is kind of astonishing how brazen some people are about this sort of thing. They make absolutely no attempt to hide what they're up to at all... And in the majority of cases, the unit still worked, so they could have moved these files somewhere a little out of the way in the filesystem. It might be in for a bad ODD or something non-critical like that. It was also a little disturbing some of the wallpapers people had. Some of them were borderline pornographic. Fortunately in my case they were all of reasonably attractive, and more importantly, of age, women, thus befitting my personal preferences... But it easily could have been something else.
You, and probably most people, might take care to try and get your porn collection off the desktop when you go to send your unit in for repair, maybe bury it a few levels deep in some obscure and innocuous sounding directory tree... Sadly there are a lot of people out there who lack this level of common sense/courtesy. Odds are the person in this story was one of those people. Don't go leaping to the conclusion the BBy tech was rifling through the person's computer, because if they were doing that, there'd be stories like this on a far more regular basis, believe me. I gave serious thought to setting up a side business ratting out all the people I found with pirated crap on their systems, just collecting rewards from the BSA, MPRIAA, etc. I didn't, but I came across enough stuff without even looking, that I could have made a pretty good supplemental income.
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