Of course you did. You’re not handing your device over to Best Buy, you’re handing it over to Jimmy on the Geek Squad who is quiet and a bit weird. And he loves to snoop into other people’s phones. Not for identity theft or reselling naughty pictures, but simply for the fun of snooping on other people.
Backup your device and wipe all of your data before handing a phone over to anyone else. It’s just safer that way.
Tbf, most of the people who are going to best buy to have their device serviced aren’t going to know how to back up and wipe it
I had the entire 4 man crew go on and on about how LaCie La Porsche hard dive enclosures (they were HDDs) were not accessible. They claimed every single one they took apart, was DOA. I was like um neat.
Went home. Pried it apart. Salvaged the completely stock Seagate HDD and tossed the shitty enclosure.
So yeah, Geek Squad competency is… not high.
I had one of those come in once when I was working IT. Iirc the hdds may have been raided so I’m not sure if you could easily recover the data unless it was like a raid 1. That said if you just want the hdds yeah they were just normal shit in an overdesigned enclosure.
Yeah nothing to do with data at all. Just wanted to salvage the physical drive. What’s funny is like it’s just a shit enclosure with some nice plastic. The insinuation that LaCie built some custom drive with proprietary controllers is just ludicrous to me. Especially from a supposed “tech” crew. Gotta wonder what they were doing to them that the drives they pulled were all DOA. I scraped a bit of the plastic near one clip, but the enclosure after the removal was totally reusable.
Seems odd to put individual external drives into a RAID array.
Also not sure it would matter unless it was a multi drive array.
Yeah the one I was thinking of was a multidrive enclosure
Also the device is in a condition that makes this difficult like not turning on or the screen being broken.
So if you’re an average user on Windows and your computer won’t boot, how would you wipe the drive?
Of course I’m not an average computer user and I understand how to do it, but I’m just trying to understand how an average user would do this if say, the bootloader or partition table is corrupt?
Sledgehammer.
Years ago, we used a drill press. And I’m not kidding.
You wrap a fridge magnet in a soft cloth (so it doesn’t scratch anything) and then give it a good scrubbing duh. Make sure you get between all the keys (the data can get stuck in there)
I’d extract the hard drive from the computer chassis and plug it into a working system using a drive repair hookup (an external drive array without the enclosure). I’d borrow a friend’s if it was possible.
The problem is the hard drive is commonly the thing that bricks, in which case your SOL. This is where you (and businesses with business secrets) are lucky to know a data-recovery expert that doesn’t squeal to the coppers. Few do.
I guess for this thread to really be productive we’d have to define “average user.” My point hinges on assuming that average users wouldn’t really understand most of what you wrote.
I’ve done data recovery for people before and I definitely do NOT snoop. I’m really big on respecting privacy and for the most part I use a Linux CLI to do it so I might happen to see some filenames here and there but I’m not really looking through stuff.
And I applaud your privacy ethic.
Yes, the average user is neither aware of the process of drive recovery / data erasure, nor aware of exposure risks that come with taking your system to Geek Squad.
I suspect most of them are not engaged in anything that might excite the FBI (so are only guilty of the typical CFAA violations that are not enforced except when an official wants to silence a given journalist).
Though to be fair there are a lot of ignorant criminals.
Time for them to learn.
Doesn’t matter if it’s Jimmy who is quiet and weird. I worked at a Verizon store. Brayden the kind, tall, outgoing handsome guy with a nice smile is worse. He would ask girls, moms, grandmas even to to unlock their phone and then immediately take them in the back to search for nudes. As you said, back up your phone and wipe it before it’s ever in anyone else’s hands.
Kinda hard to do that if it won’t turn on, though.
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With a USB cable and your phone manufactures backup software installed on your computer, as recommended by your manufacturer?
But seriously, this may not always be an option. And you have to decide if you want to risk giving it to Jimmy in that state. But keep in mind that you do, Jimmy is taking a copy of those bikini pics. And you probably don’t want to know what he plans to do with them.
You don’t. You back things up before they break. Then when they break, you have backups for recovery.
Just stating the obvious, in a vain hope that it would get someone to start, improve, or test, or even just think about their backups.
Oh man, if only there was some way to answer that question using the exact thing you typed.
https://www.androidauthority.com/extract-data-broken-android-phone-819324/
https://www.samsung.com/us/support/answer/ANS00079132/Or by changing it to “iphone” specific.
https://www.mobikin.com/idevice/backup-iphone-with-broken-screen.html
https://www.imyfone.com/iphone-tips/how-to-backup-iphone-if-screen-is-broken/
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Worked in phone repair for ten years with a wide range of people.
I agree with everything you said.
Absolutely not surprised. I’ve had multiple friends that worked Geek Squad. All of them have admitted to snooping at least once and most have said their coworkers did it constantly.
Don’t take your computer to Geek Squad, folks. They’re all untrained highschoolers following a script anyways
FBI offers a bounty to technicians who report incriminating evidence, so yeah, when you take your repair tickes to a large service, you can expect this.
Local services depend on word of mouth so they might be more respectful, but only because they are incentivized to not let rumors of their snooping get out.
Still, surveillance staff routinely pass saucy and gross pics all over their office and we only hope they don’t dump them on the internet like high-school students
This was in Canada, where snooping like this is illegal.
I hope in Canada law enforcement cares more about following the rules than it does in the US.
Louis Rossmann video here we come!
Seriously he’s right, the only stories you ever hear about this are from big repair places.
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u r dumb enough to let someone take advantage of your naivety in some topic out there, tech nerd.
that’s just how shit works, remember it.
Just another reason to hate Canada. /s
