Acer Computer Repair Copied my Data

And the real icing on the cake was watch him clear out all the histories in the pc (ie, etc) so that when i got it back there would be no record of what someone would have been

by ---tk--- Jan 22, 2009

I have to send off my girls HP to get the left hinge replaced... lol...

Spector Pro

by ---tk--- Jan 22, 2009

ROFL... sorry its not funny, but it really kind of is. I mean seriously, you have Acer by the balls and all they want to do is extend the WARRANTY ... shoot, sell your story to some new station, Fox News channel, CNN... they will give you enough money to buy you a couple more laptops...
Plus, how did they get past your password? it wasn't the HDD that was having issues..? As soon as it POSTed and went to the login screen, it should have been shutdown...

by jdclyde Jan 22, 2009

Do you think that the vendors don't have access past the security?

by ---tk--- Jan 22, 2009

I was being sarcastic... :)

I have the same tools they have, as far as passwd reseting, it isn't hard. The shear way he went about it... The tech didn't think the user would notice that his password was missing... I mean come on, thats just lame.

There are a lot of live cds you can boot from that will remove a windows password without even logging into windows

-edit sorry didn't see the sarcasm post before i posted this one

by dr dij Jan 22, 2009

you have boot off hard drive only!

If they put in a new mobo tho they would bypass the hardware password as the new one would not have it.

My problem with Acer repair:

I hvae a quad-core. It randomly HARD BOOTS with no warning at all.

I have sent it back twice and given up! Even tho I convinced them to pay shipping 2nd time, their diagnostics are apparently incapable of finding problem.

Note that before sending it in, I ran their utility to restore from hidden partiition. So the PC, if hardware OK should have been to factory spec.

This lessens my opinions of today's PCs. In the future they will become more modular (mobo will be a module instead of backplane) and have complete diagnostics for all modules.

Today's PCs want to make me puke from lack of ability to pinpoint problems.

On the plus side, despite not being able to repair the PC, they were polite.

I have my wife use it for browsing internet now, and she still gets PO'd as it will randomly hard boot (no windoze warning, just blank screen then going thru boot BIOS).

That way is is not a $1000 doorstop. I was planning to have it take over as my primary PC, which is a 1.7ghz HP that I bought USED and almost NEVER reboots or hangs.

http://privacylaw.proskauer.com/articles/invasion-of-privacy/

And that is what i said to acer. Once the motherboard was replaced and it POST'ed to the windows prompt end of repair. They tried to tell me they run diags under windows and i told them i'd believe it but the tech didn't run daigs, unless of course he loaded it ran it and closed it in under 15 sec. The only reason he logged onto my pc was to snoop through my files. He didn't do anything else.

by nospam.online Jan 30, 2009

I have a Linux and a dos boot disk that can do this. The use of such in this case was a crime and Acer should be forced to address this.

by robo_dev Jan 22, 2009

Federal Statute:
The federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act , 18 U.S.C. ? 1030. It's a bit of a stretch, but it could apply, depending on what data he stole, and also what data he viewed, but did not copy.

Further, the tech committed a breach of your private data. Contact the Texas Attorney General's office.

If the tech downloaded anything like photos of your children, then the Texas AG is gonna hang-em high, because they have done some very high profile COPPA Act prosecutions in Texas. While COPPA deals more with online data, Texas prosecutors are mighty trigger happy when kids are involved.

http://www.oag.state.tx.us/index.shtml
contact the FTC: http://www.ftc.gov/privacy/

Spector is amazing; have used it before.

Thanks for the info i was at a loss for what i could do and didn't even know where to begin looking. I will be using your suggestions thanks so much

by .martin. Jan 22, 2009

because all end users are morons!

No you are a moron for saying that..how old are you 12? 13 maybe..

by pringles86 Jan 30, 2009

He was being sarcastic... I hope

by tony hopkinson Jan 23, 2009

Tell them you'll settle for an income for life.

You go to court with this, and as long as your evidence of the breach stands up, they are f'ked.

I'm not a big litigation fan, but this is a stand out candidate, for what it was meant to be for.

by mdbradsh Jan 28, 2009

I build my own servers and PCs!

by whassupwidat Jan 29, 2009

AMEN.

Build it Yourself, and screw the rest of 'em...

by johnmcgrew Jan 30, 2009

I've never sent back a PC with a hard drive, and if forced to, I'd clone it then wipe it.

This episode is a great example of why.

by ---tk--- Jan 26, 2009

Sorry about your luck, that's really not cool! Those are the kinds of people that give us bad names! Even though we can, most of us don't.. Its called having respect for someone else's property/data....

After hearing of this story its really going to make me think twice about purchasing any of their products....

by whassupwidat Jan 29, 2009

If Microsoft can torch someone for Music 'Piracy', you should, in the VERY LEAST, sue them for EVERY Penny they have...

EVEN IF, you don't get a dime, the Bad Publicity throughout the IT Community will cost them an unimaginable 'Fortune' in Business, and such.

I would ALSO, name the Parent Companies AND 'Partners' as Co-Defendants.

If you have VERIFIABLE, Air Tight Proof, I'm sure that there are Lawyers, or Law Firms (as much as I HATE Lawyers), that would take this case, just for the exposure.

Hey, EVERYBODY, is talking about 'Social Engineering', and the Problems/Dangers associated. If you can't Trust Manufacturers, then what???!!!

by rfolden Jan 30, 2009

I would have pulled the HDD out of the machine and put it in an USB external HDD enclosure or equivalent, hooked it to a different machine and backed up THEN removed my personal data before sending said machine/HDD out for repair.

Pain in your American Revised Standard English? You betcha!

This does not excuse the supposed acts of the technician, however, as a knowlegable PC professional you know beforehand how easy it is to get data off a HDD.

Perhaps in this case an ounce of prevention...

Yea Yea I don't think he needs a lecture...even if he did what you said, it would still be in the same situation.He didn't say someone stole his data they copied it..

Lets see. A 256 character randomly generated password that even i don't know. That was my ounce of prevention and if not for the urgancy of the situaion i would have moved the data before sending but this was a must do now. So if all you have on your house are door locks and someone breaks in by your logic they didn't have an ounce of prevention ...

by nospam.online Jan 30, 2009

Call an Attorney till you find one willing to take them on for the rape and violation of your privacy and trust. I am figuring the stuff that was taken was personal but not "private" in nature as now they may post it on the net.

I have a experiance from the other side of the work bench. Not to take from your issue but it works both way's.

Guy asked me to fix his wife's laptop. It was hard drive failure. In transfering her documents and data to new drive on my work computer I found images of child porn, S&M images and young kids naked and semi naked in the couple's home drinking. Turns out she was in some s&m group cheating on her husband and letting son have boozing sex party's in the house while he wasnt home.
Knowledge of this forced me to report the find to law enforcment. Last I heard She is in jail awaiting trial for this and other crimes.

by chug Jan 30, 2009

Regarding the original poster's situation, I definitely agree, the tech should have booted to Windows logon, then shut it down. And since the original poster has other proof through the keylogger that what the tech was doing had nothing to do with the repair I definitely agree he's got something to go with. BUT, they could argue that the tech was "testing" the system, especially with a whole new system board. The USB drive and copying files to it was verifying that the USB port worked. (I once got a replacement motherboard for one problem and on the new board I got the parallel port was bad, back in the day when printers all worked through the parallel port, so I can understand wanting to fully test out the system beyond just booting to the Windows logon.

If the tech had just quickly opened Explorer, went straight to any directory (whatever it was) and copied that directory of to a flash drive, I could buy that he was "just testing" the USB port. But if the tech truly "searched" for pictures and media files, that's clearly out of line.

BUT, tied to the message that mine is a reply of, I remember reading an article within the last year or two of a guy who was convicted of child pornography because he took his PC to a shop and the tech found the child porn on his PC. He tried to argue that his privacy was violated but the tech said he wasn't specifically "looking" through the guys drive, he just stumbled across them as part of the normal work he was doing on the drive. The court agreed.

Thus, if you're turning your PC over to a tech, you can't expect that they won't see anything, and if they "happen" to see anything incriminating, the tech is obligated to report it to law enforcement.

In most cases it would purely be the defendant's word against the tech's word as to whether the tech just "stumbled across" it or was "digging" through the data.

if he had used windows explorer and not windows media play to search through my files. If he hadn't used explorer to browse the directory on the desktop which he copied and seeing what was in it and then copied it and then browsed it on his jump drive to make sure he got what he want.

by cmiller5400 Jan 30, 2009

What a blatant invasion of privacy. Acer and the Tech that fixed your computer should be publicly flogged.

Personally, I NEVER send a PC/laptop back to the mfr with any data on it. I always clone the drive, then wipe it with DBAN before I send it back. Let them load an image on it if they want to test it.

I use a disk wiping software called Drive Scrubb by iolo that and Dban or wondeful..great idea...what do you use to make a clone is it an .iso image?

by fmiller Jan 30, 2009

In a perfect world this would not happen. In a PERFECT world i can walk down any street in America with 100.00 dollar bills hanging out of my pockets. There are LAWS to protect me!!
Over the past 30 years I have employed many techs and maybe one would have pulled such a stunt. We must know it can and will happen.

BUT with your back ground WHY would you buy acer?? LOL

by cmiller5400 Jan 30, 2009

I use both Acronis True Image, and Norton Ghost (corporate edition) to create images.

Common sympton of overheating is unsuspected reboots, change the power supply and I'll bet you a nicket it won't reboot again...

by s. giesbrecht Jan 30, 2009

Also check the CPU fan. Note: Acer should have noticed it. With "PC Techs" now adays, anyone can "Fix" a computer. I wish people would leave the fixing PCs to Professionals.

by dr dij Jan 30, 2009

is that it can do the hard-reboot almost instanltly after booting, but only if I ACTUALLY PUT A LOAD on the computer, such as opening a browser window, etc.

Then it can be stable for hours and DOESN'T reboot spontanteusly, only when USING it.

That made me thing one of the quad-core CPUs is out. I'm thinking that if it was fan or PS it would reboot when overheated regardless if using, and that the Acer tech would have found something physically obvious like a fan stopped or PS bad.

I can also go into the bios and see the fan is running

by mfilip Jan 30, 2009

I don't think that anyone should need to worry about their personal data being stolen. If ACER is requiring the hard drive to be left in the machine upon return then they should be monitoring their own techs and have a very strict policy on these things. If you're ACER it's ridiculous to not see this coming. I hope that the company and the tech get what's coming for this.

I also think this happens more often than any personal user would like to imagine. I know if I ever need to send my PC back in for repair I will certainly be putting a keylogger on for this purpose alone.

by ---tk--- Jan 30, 2009

by happyheathen Feb 21, 2009

Just curious...isn't Spector Pro detected as malware when scanned?

by mattie289404 Jan 31, 2009

I read an article I believe somewhere in this forum, about Geek Squad guys got caught copying porn off of the customers computers...I don't know what the answer is to this, but if you invent something to stop this from happening you'll be rich :)...let me know if you do, I want fist shot at the stock...

by s. giesbrecht Jan 30, 2009

What I do before I send anything to the shop for "Repair" or warrenty work is backup my drive onto tape then Wipe it clean. The "PC Repairwo/man" can look all they want and find nothing.

When I work on Home user's PC, I do the following step:

1) I inform them that I am/will be accessing their hard drive data to back it up for them. If they have a password - I ask for it, I never user a craker to get passed thier security (even though I can).

2) Copy their hard drive via Ghost for the whole drive or if the HDD is bad, copy any Data files that I can.

3) Do the repair(s)

4) Transfer the data onto a DVD/CD and/or thier hdd

5) After 1 month I remove thier image/data. I keep it only if other problems comes up or some other files did not get copied over to the new DVD/CD/HDD

I tell the users that I do scan for anything illegal like kitty pron, "how to make a b0mb", etc... I will then report it to the police.

If there is something that I like e.g. Recipe for BBQ Ribs or something like that, I ask the customer's permission if I can make a copy for myself.

by the scummy one Jan 30, 2009

when sending in a system to manufacturer support, they suggest to Remove your hard drive unless it is the problem part and backup and remove your data. Also they mention that they are Not Responsible for your data, and that the drive may be re-imaged (happens often).

So, although this was just wrong, this is ALSO Your Fault for not following instructions/warnings.

by johnmcgrew Jan 30, 2009

...they insisted upon having the hard drive in place. He did, against his initial misgivings, follow instructions.

His only mistake was not wiping the drive before sending it.

I didn't care if they reimaged the hard drive and the tech told me i had to send it. So being the good customer i did what i was told. I would have found time to copy the data but i had a wife on my case day in and day out and no money for a sata external enclosure. And no where in the warnings does it say WE WILL SEARCH YOUR HARD DRIVE AND COPY WHAT WE WANT responsibilty for my data is not the issue its the invasion of privacy and the copying of my data that he had no need of. And if he had nothing to hide then why bother cleaning out all the histories? This sounds like an Acer response if I ever heard one.

by the scummy one Jan 30, 2009

but apparently nobody got that.

I agree, the tech appears to have been out of line, and I do not condone it unless he was just backing up data just in case.

As for having your data on it in the first place, many manufacturers, even for HW issues will immediately wipe the drive and reload the image to make sure it is not some SW problem on your system that causes a problem. I am surprised that they didnt wipe your data away.

I missed the part (and it was pointed out) that you were told to have the drive in there. In my limited dealings with manufacturer support, they want you to remove the drive before sending it in, unless it is a HDD related issue (or may be). Also, we were informed before hand that the drive would most likely be wiped and to backup data if the drive was sent in with the unit.

Since then, there have been several complaints about drives being wiped for HW issues when they didnt follow the instructions. So I mistakenly assumed that you did not pay attention to the warnings. However, if there was/is anything on your drive that you want to keep confidential, you should remove data before sending it to ANY shop for whatever reason. Keep a good backup, or keep data on an external device and back it up. Keeping it on the main drive is asking for disaster.

by older mycroft Jan 30, 2009

What's more, the NB went from North of Scotland (Ross-shire) to South of England (Devon) and Acer paid transit both ways.

It seems odd that an American company like Acer, charges transit costs in their home country, yet charge zilch in foreign countries. I thought every Acer NB had an International Travellers' Warranty. Mine did.

The only real reason i bought was because my old machine finally died. I happen to get the quad core and 3 gigs of ram a 500 gig drive and a multi dvd for less than the price of the parts (CompUSA went Out of buiness) i was only waiting for the warranty to run out and going to buy a new case and mobo and let that be it.

Your house has a lock and so does your car my computer had a password. There are ways around all three but do you take everything you own everywhere you go and have it on you at all times?

by kama410 Jan 30, 2009

It could be argued that he was searching for image files because they are large and would be a more demanding test. It could also be argued that he checked the jump drive to see if everything had copied successfully and then 'forgot' to erase the data.

Honestly, I'm not saying I think that is what happened. Not hardly. I'm just saying that these arguments could be made.

To be frank about this, if I sent my computer in for repairs and found that some tech had copied the hundreds of music files I have on my HD I really wouldn't care. If I had homemade porn of me and my wife I either wouldn't send them my hard drive or I would find a way to remove it from the drive. It's your information, you need to protect it.

I did end user support for a manufacturer. I know that we wouldn't have insisted that you send your HD if you claimed to have sensitive private information on it and strongly refused to send the drive with the machine.

I can assure you, I wouldn't try to get some tech put in jail for human curiosity. It is human nature to want to know what other people do. If it weren't no one would watch TV or even read fictional books.

Do you really think it is reasonable to destroy this person's life for a minute of unprofessional behavior?

I will say that if I foolishly left some 'sensitive personal data' on my hard drive that later got posted to forums and other sites I would consider it to be a much more serious breach.

he didn't copy anything from any folder he found in media player. He copied data from the desktop. Not from the folders where my pics, music, video's were stored. As far as being curious you see what other people are doing with your eyes not your jump drive. And ruin his life for one minute of unprofessional behavior, have you ever heard once a cheater always a cheater. I am sure i wasn't the first and if he didn't get fired i wont be the last. And would u make the same argument for a coworker who got you fired for lieing to the boss?

by kama410 Jan 30, 2009

How about you come clean here and tell us what it was that s/he actually copied, if it was not any of the pics, music, or videos?

If we're talking about some random trivial data, who cares? If we're talking about your financial information I wouldn't hesitate for an instant to put him/her in jail. And I mean if s/he copied a checking account balance, let alone an account number.

Trivial: You mentioned that s/he would have had fifteen seconds to do something without you seeing a screen shot of it. I can tell you I could start copying an entire directory in about 2 seconds: Ctrl+A, Ctrl+C, Alt+Tab, Ctrl+V, Alt+Spacebar, N. OK, maybe less than 2 seconds. Even using a mouse you could do it in a lot less than 15 seconds.

My god! A screenshot every 15 seconds??? That's 240 every hour!! What do you do, spend 3 hours reviewing and deleting screenshots every day??? Either you are taking very low-res shots, of you have GBs of free space just to store the screenshots.