Come on since when is it news that techies rifle through your files . I've worked in lots of places and its always been a source of amusement the crap users send in with their pc's .

Simple answer is if you dont want the techies looking at pics of your wife tied to the bed then dont leave them on your pc .

Either encrypt sensitive data (be it porn or otherwise), or delete it before the PC goes in for repair.

Pay your employees the same wage as an immigrant field worker and suddenly you are surprised that they take liberties with customer data? Yeah. Brilliant.

Truth is, this should not be going on, but Best Buy (and the other chains, I'm sure) do little to prevent it. Bottom line, they should be doing continuous scans to check up on their staff. Some $4/hr class D techie isn't going to police himself. To think so is to practically endorse such behaviour.

Make the policies, stick to the policies, enforce the policies. This is a classic example of a company creating a policy and then not enacting any means to enforce it. Then, when it is seems to have gone astray (publicly), the crackdown comes in the form of a random round of firings.

Personally, if I was fired by Best Buy, I'd sue their assess off.

Isn't a perk of being a tech all the free stuff folks leave, I mean it's not really stealing if their password is either a, their dogs name b, their kids name or c, their football team.

Ohhh I remember the time a customer asked me to retrieve her "picture" files, it took ove a week to print all the pics off and post them to pay sites.

Strangely enough no one cries fowl when Garry Glitter gets caught by a spotty geek looking for pics only to be dissapointed by his search results.

...how can they encrypt it or how can they remove it. This was probably an unexpected event. When bought it was a good deal. The computer is broken! They want it fixed! If you're pretty average and you have a multipurpose life (house, kids, nagging spouse, more money than sense) those kind of precautions are very far from your mind. How many people do you know backs up their hard drive?

Well, you'd be running the risk that you'd be reported to the police and forced to give up your password so the plod can oggle your missus in the nood.

I can't believe some of the comments here. Do they really think that it's ok to snoop into people's private data just because they are low paid? They are paid to fix the computer and that's it.

Suppose you hire a contractor to do work in your house. He brings in lowly paid labourers... since they are lowly paid, does that give them the right to browse through your underwear drawer and file storage, since you didn't put everything in a safe or burn it (the equivalent of encrypting or deleting files on the computer)? Come on.

Those Geek Squadies deserved to be fired. Shame on Best Buy for not handling this long ago.

of Futureshop, which is a canadian arm of Best Buy, I can say very little is done to protect anything. We had a laptop returned/exchanged, so I put it back on the shelf (after it was -supposed- to be formatted/restored), booted it up, and on the desktop was an excel file of bank accounts for this guy, his resume, and a few pictures of him and his family.

Also, as for the copying CD thing.. as a guy in the computer sales area, I was told many times to copy copyrighted disks by the managers. Movies, music, etc. I was threatened with being written up when I refused to do it once after one of my coworkers got fired over copying a movie for one of the home theatre guys.

There's a difference between a discount store who throws together a raggamuffin team of kids with computer skills, and a professional paid adequately for their skills and reputation.

I won't even go into the bad judgement of buying a system at bestbuy or taking it back to be fixed, let alone storing sensitive, err, data, on that system then handing it over to a stranger.

You might as well put a fly-strip in the kitchen then curse at the flies for landing on it.

Well, that's my post in whole, really.

"I'm Han Solo, and here's my best buddy Geek Squader."

As for the data: Good Lord, people actually pay money to have their hard drives recovered? I had a drive crash that scragged all my porn--uh, all my IMPORTANT BUSINESS FILES about a year ago, and it took me about a day to find a freeware recovery program that had me up and running, as it were, in a matter of hours.

...when you going to copy off the porn and music, boot the system up with a Live Linux CD first, so the tracking software won't be running.

Ya got to keep in mind - when when you mix complex technology ( computer ) and the average Joe/Jane together ... some interesting stuff is bound to happen. These folks have no clue as to where these files - photos - etc. are - or are not - or just tossed in the "trash".

I ran my own consulting biz for a year or so - charging a fair rate (certainly more than these boobs were being paid) and giving my customers good value. And a big part of that was PRIVACY - ensuring their files were kept private - and if they were selling or giving a computer away - that their disks were scrubbed.

In the end I just got tired of dealing new customers trying to haggle me down or suggest my rates were a bit high. I now laugh as I leave Tech stores passing a line of noobs carrying their junk in to be geeked on by some teenager.

What kind of mouthbreathing halfwits are these people rooting through other peoples private stuff. It's understandable in a corporate setting, everyone in any IT department knows exactly what every employee gets paid for instance. It's completely revolting when done with a personal machine.

Being paid pennies or megabucks doesn't enter into it, you're either a scumbag or you're not.

The real way to do this is to take a backup copy of their hard drive, by physically removing it etc etc, then you can browse their porn and warez at your leisure - after the customer has taken their machine back.

Simple really, and less chance that the customer will catch you!

As a former member of the blue and yellow, I can sincerely tell you that 99% of Geek Squad agents know NOTHING about fixing computers. I sold new systems to people and would be interrupted by "Agents" asking me tech questions so they could go fix systems... and these people were paid 3-8 dollars more an hour than I was!

One time I was chilling up at the "precinct" talking to a buddy of mine... I watched an "Agent" spend ten minutes trying to figure out why the system wasn't recognizing the newly installed hard drive... and the whole time the IDE cable wasn't plugged into the motherboard!

Lesson - if you don't know how to fix your own box, buy a new one! It'll be cheaper in the long run!

Well I actually DO work at GS and while the dorks at the stores normally don't know what they are doing they have a service center where people actually DO have to know what they are doing, and while you may or may not believe it the majority of stuff I see go through there people aren't paying ANYTHING for us to fix them. Granted the majority of money that the consumer does pay is through the extended service plan, more times often than not the customer gets well more than they pay for.

Ill say another thing about the "Geek Squad City" (service center) We don't really have any trouble with data theft. Most teams are under constance surveillance by loss prevention. And they have some GOOD camaras...

You can bash Best Buy all you like but when it comes down to it... Yeah BBY employs "knowitall" type teenagers in their stores but behind them is actually a good team of techies who know their stuff.

I guess the point is that while you may have had a buncha guys in your store that didnt know anything, that it doesn't necessarily mean that EVERYONE there is a halfwit.

I just think its funny how all these "ex-best buy" employees always come on the web to talk about how crappy the company is, when in reality if you do you job right the first time without goofing around and looking at porn or doing a bunch of other crap your not suppose to be doing you can go very far and they will treat you very well.

Techies Rights, as published in the latest edition of Viz.

"Why do you have pictures of my naked mrs Dave?"

"Techies rights mate, techies rights"