Although we try to have our computer in the best possible conditions, no one is safe from having to take it for repair sooner or later. Beyond the cost or if it is worth the cost of repairing or buying a new one, we should also be concerned about the privacy of the data that our equipment contains and in the hands of whoever remains.
A new study conducted by the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada , shows some amazing results that are pretty scary to think about what we’re really doing when we leave our equipment in the hands of a so-called repair professional.
Your private data is in danger while repairing
In the event that you have had the misfortune that a computer has stopped working and you have sent it to the technical service, perhaps you should think better about the risks that it will entail. When you leave your equipment at these repair services, you also leave your access credentials at the mercy of the technicians , creating privacy concerns for the owners’ personal data.
Based on this study, it was found that most repair service providers do not have any privacy policies or controls to protect the personal data of device owners from meddling by technicians .
One of the tests carried out was the delivery of tampered devices for repair at 16 repair service providers and they collected data (except for two of them where no data could be recovered) on widespread privacy violations by technicians, including the snooping of personal data, copying of device data, and deletion of traces of snooping activities. The records showed that technicians at six of the locations had accessed personal data and that two of those stores also copied data onto a personal device.
For this analysis, privacy violations were classified into six categories : access to the user data folder (which contains documents), any of the image folders, image disclosure, finance folder, browsing history, and copying of personal data of users to an external storage device.
Here’s a breakdown of the six visits that resulted in snooping:
Women are more likely to be spied on
The study also shows how the intrusions into the private information of the owners of the equipment to be repaired varied depending on the gender of the client that requires these services. Although in one man there was only one browsing history query, in the case of women it went further.
Devices owned by women were more likely to be spied on, and such spying tended to seek more sensitive data , including photographs, both sexual and non-sexual in nature, as well as revealing documents and sensitive financial information.
“We were impressed with the results,” Hassan Khan , one of the researchers, said in an interview. Of particular concern, he said, was the data copying , which occurred during repairs to one male customer and the other to a female. “We thought they would just look at the data at most.”
