Looking through comments both here and on Digg, it seems that finding and saving customer’s porn from their laptops is one of the perks of the job, and it’s hardly limited to the Geek Squad.

Sometimes they just look at the porn and laugh. Sometimes they save it on a big communal computer. Sometimes they report people to the police if they find child porn.

Just remember that when you bring your computer in for repairs, you’re basically handing over your entire life to a stranger. If you save “naughty” content on your computer, you might want to consider saving it to an external hard drive, or learn how to repair your own computer.

10 such comments, inside…

(Photo: Adrian Wallet)

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Consumerist commenters:

XianZhuXuande writes:
I have known Geeksquad employees who have accumulated pornography and music collections from customer computers, for example, and everyone has that story of the nudie pics they’ve seen of customers themselves, but people who would go this far in violating customer privacy are rare indeed.

filmmakker writes:
As far as searching for people’s porn, music, photos, etc…OK, that totally happened all the time, but in almost every case, it was when we were being paid to do a data back-up anyway.

Digg users:

alphabet:
my friend works at geek squad. He told me of a story where a hot girl and her father walked in to get their computer fixed. The agents found the pics of her and her boyfriend having sex and saved it. When she came back later with her dad, one of the agents said “Alright, we backed up everything for you for,” and then he glanced at the girl and said “everything…” At that point, the girl got bright red in the face and just wanted to get out of there.

nerfdude:
back around 2001, a friend of mine worked for Best Buy. this was before they had Geek Squad handling all their technology-related installs, upgrades, and repairs. he took me into the back room where they did all of their customer PC work, and they had a common computer with a half dozen USB hard drives attached to it, filled to the brim with porn, movies, and mp3’s. whenever ANYBODY dropped off a computer, they’d do whatever was needed on it, then they’d hunt down all of its media and copy it over. every employee in the store knew about it, and nobody cared.

anotherthought:
local small pc repair stores does it too, my bro used to work for one, he was told to open up computers ($35) and look inside even if my bro knew it was a software problem which might be something as simple as and update.

o and yes, he hunted for stuf

usrlocalbin:
heh…This was the highlight of our day at CompUSA back in those days.

The best time was when a dude from MTV’s Real World brought his laptop in for service.
This was back in 2000 or around there, I can’t remember the dude’s name but he was the one token black guy on the show at the time. My boss worked on his computer and found some videos.
I’ll just say that this dude liked his porn with a little human feces…..
*shudder*

cpuenvy:
Most repair shops do the Compulsory Porn Scan.

It’s a requirement on my bench, and my sluts folder is over 2GB 🙂

I have turned in 3 pedophiles and extorted another, also.

ma5t3r_chi3f:
I think all techs will look for porn/movies/music on a computer if there is enough time and the owner is hot. I remember when I used to work for BBY we would do it just to mess around. Whoever wrote the article sounds like they came from a super shiesty store. We all know stores like that exist, but not all BBYs are that shiesty. Our store wasn’t that bad, but then again, I did leave over a year ago. We definitely would look for media though. Lots of porn & lots of music.

aidsbunny:
Not really surprising. Having worked in the large batch film developing industry I have a rather nice collection of self-pics and amateur porn. No, not going to share for obvious legal reasons.

bitterbug:
I did Y2K contracting at the Ontario Ministry of Health, and while backing up a directors machine I found videos of bestiality and teenage girls pissing, so I passed the info on to my superiors. I was pissed that my tax dollars were being spent on some asshole downloading porn in his office.

Nothing was done apparently, as I google his name occasionally and it appears he still works there. I remember the name because it happened to be the same as one of the founding members of Ministry. And no, not Al.

— BEN POPKEN

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