When you need to drop off your tech devices for a repair, how confident are you that they won’t be snooped on?
CBC’s Marketplace took smartphones and laptops to repair stores across Ontario — including large chains Best Buy and Mobile Klinik — and found that in more than half of the documented cases, technicians accessed intimate photos and private information not relevant to the repair.
Marketplace dropped off devices at 20 stores, ranging from small independent shops to medium-sized chains to larger national chains, after installing monitoring software on the devices. In total, 16 stores were recorded. (At four stores, the tracking software didn’t log anything, or the stores didn’t appear to turn the devices on.)
Technicians at nine stores accessed private data, including one technician who not only viewed photos but copied them onto a USB key.
And that’s why you would never be put on a jury Mr. “Hunt the predators and rapists down and kill them violently”.
If I were in your position, I might be getting equally angry at the meer suggestion that privacy is important, but I would be wrong for being angry at the wrong topic.
Anyway, this fight against encryption is going to lose, for the sake if journalists who report in hostile countries without freedom of speech, for the sake of kids with parents who’d kill them if they came out as trans, and for people in the intelligence industry.