Another Computer Security Issue: Failed Hard Drives & What Repairers do with Them
Dave Winer writes about a serious security issue: his Mac’s hard disk failed, he took it in for repairs, and the shop refuses to give him his hard drive back. He even wrote a letter to Steve Jobs explaining the problem and asking for assistance. Some of the comments on the letter are just creepy. Are repair shops intentionally being malicious? I doubt it. The practice, especially the one where the fellow describes a store employee downloading his hard drive onto a machine customers could access and not deleting it for a while, is probably more careless than malicious and just plain dumb.
People have been saying for years not to keep valuable, secret, personal, etc., etc., information on your computers when you take them in for repairs, but when your hard drive dies, you don’t always have the option of removing things you don’t want other people to see. And since you already paid for the hard drive when it came with your computer, why are some people getting charged fees like $250 to get their drives back? Luckily, when my hard drive died and I had to get a new one, the repair place I used gave me my old drive back. Sometimes, I guess it does pay not to take your machine to a box store.
Scary, scary.
