When you need to drop off your tech devices for a repair, how confident are you that they won’t be snooped on?
CBC’s Marketplace took smartphones and laptops to repair stores across Ontario — including large chains Best Buy and Mobile Klinik — and found that in more than half of the documented cases, technicians accessed intimate photos and private information not relevant to the repair.
Marketplace dropped off devices at 20 stores, ranging from small independent shops to medium-sized chains to larger national chains, after installing monitoring software on the devices. In total, 16 stores were recorded. (At four stores, the tracking software didn’t log anything, or the stores didn’t appear to turn the devices on.)
Technicians at nine stores accessed private data, including one technician who not only viewed photos but copied them onto a USB key.
This being so common is creepy, but I feel like I just read/heard about a case where some pedo was recently arrested because a tech found CSAM on his phone during a repair and reported him. I really value privacy, but in that one case I’m glad the tech got nosey. I’m a bit intoxicated right now and cannot remember where I heard about this, but probably some true crime podcast or YouTube channel. I’ll update with a source if I remember.
EDIT here’s one, but there are dozens of cases like this if you search https://kmph.com/news/local/tech-repair-shop-helps-arrest-customer-possessing-child-pornography-in-fresno
The thing is, it’s really hard to be consistent on beliefs, especially in cases like this where it might sound unfavorable.
If you say you’re against surveillance and spying on devices, people will generally agree that’s a good thing. But this is an example of privacy invasion, and is justified because they caught CSAM, so it must be good, right?
Well in the big picture of things, this would be setting a precedent. Where they can justify these things because they can find and stop these things. This tends to lead to the “think of the children!” fallacy. Legislators are actively using this argument to push anti-privacy measures like breaking encryption so they can stop this. So it unfortunately means, respect privacy, or allow these things to go unchecked.
Freedom comes at a price, and you gotta stay consistent even if it lets bad guys get away with things. You can justify a lot of fascism in the name of stopping the bad guys, since obviously it’s not a good look to defend those actions.
Ehh. Your way sets really bad precedent that deprives all of us of freedoms in much more horrific ways than some retard getting caught with CSAM he should not have been having in the first place.
Freedom means more than that and to argue otherwise is to argue innocent people need to be sacrificed on your political altar to make you feel like you can be safe hiding shit. You never can no matter how free your country is.
What do you mean deprives us of freedoms?
Everyone has a right to lock their bathroom door. Crime might be comitted behind the bathroom door, but usually there will be other evidence of that without looking in the bathroom, so there is no need for the government to legislate that all bathrooms should remove their locks.
No one ever questions the right of locking your bathroom door.
Because the ones who violate our rights the most aren’t tyrannical governments but the people around us. The people who rape us, murder us, commit genocide against us, who commit the most unspeakable of depraved acts with the banality of a zombie in a fucking zombie movie.
And you think that’s okay in the name of stopping a government from turning tyrannical when you knew it was always going to be like that anyway because all governments are inherently authoritarian in nature.
Well yes, because it’s not up to the government to take care of or protect your kids. And it’s your job to make sure they can protect themselves online. That’s just common sense.
Additionally, the government is still effective at catching bad guys without backdoors to encryption, and this stuff doesn’t stop you from monitoring your kids devices.
Yes in the US, Texas for example has used publicly available information to jail moms who travel for abortions.
If the government were to trample on the freedom of privacy, it would affect the right to protest, it would affect freedom of assembly, it would affect freedom of opinion.
China literally monitors most of their citizens communications this way.
We do NOT want governments to invade privacy for the sake of security.
Because, if the government can see what you do, then criminal actors can also see what you do too.
So TIL it’s on me to hunt down predators who abduct my kids and use them to make CSAM or sell them into sex slavery. That actually is pretty close to the truth in today’s tyrannical world.
Governments are always going to surveil their populations en masse and abuse them in the ways you described and more regardless of what their constitution and code of law says, so it’s silly to waste your time with a slippery slope argument when we’re already at the bottom of the valley, always have been and always will be. So are criminal actors.
So we need something for us because rights simply won’t cut it and the Great Experiment obviously failed. That’s not gonna change just because you don’t like it.
Well it’s understandable that you think the predators are random men in white vans texting your kids, grooming, and abducting them, but in actuality, a ton of the major produces of CSAM are parents or family members.
This doesn’t account for a smaller, but significant percentage of self-producers that post online because they’re following online sexual trends, innocently self-expressing, or self-exploiting.
Having the goverment ban encryption will only undermine the privacy and security of law abiding citizens, and jeopardize national security. Parents don’t have to send messages to their kids really.
The police won’t protect your child from your spouse.
Banning encryption won’t do anything to curb this concern of yours, its like banning car locks because people could hide heroin in cars.
I can empathize with your stance, but I have to tell you, that the “protect children” argument has been used to justify genocide, racial segregation, and so many other violations of civil rights within the last 100 years.
Dude, I am an abuse survivor. I know more about this first-hand than you with all of your studies. Why do you think I’m saying surveillance is so important? The whole fucking point is it’s because family, neighbors, and people of high community esteem are the ones who do it. They’re masters of social dynamics and so without surveillance tools for the general public, they’ll never be caught and will continue to rule society from the shadows through mass rape, abuse, murder and oppression, especially of women.
But you’ll be telling me my dumb ass is just biased, angry and bloodthirsty next. I know your stupid-ass playbook because I’ve heard this crap over the years.
Try telling the kid next door whose mind will be permanently broken because her piece of shit sperm donor keeps sneaking into her room and diddling her every night that nothing can be done about it because he’s sneaky about it and she’s incapable of recognizing what’s happening to her is wrong, let alone reporting it herself. Tell her that’s what freedom means even if it means her innocence is sacrificed on the altar to the slaveowning founding fathers and if she doesn’t like it she can just go to counseling and learn to let that shit go (AKA go fuck herself like her daddy did).
Go ahead and tell that to a quarter of all American women and a sixth of all of their men who have been raped in their lifetime and would have seen justice if they were allowed the tools to find and jail or at least kill their rapists themselves. Who are usually spouses or family.
Or the thousands of families whose loved ones are being murdered on the street every year BY the tyrannical government which has always been tyrannical and always would have been because the dumbass framers failed to take into account the obvious genocide of Black people they were actively participating in.
Tell all of those motherfuckers they have to be sacrificed on the altar to George Washington and Thomas Jefferson to appease the freedom gods while we still are being surveiled and searched and murdered with no positive benefit, because that’s what freedom and rights actually mean to you.
Feel free to write your own wall of text below so you can feel like you’re winning something, I’m not gonna read it:
What
Read what I said again, slowly this time
Not sure if you read what you wrote, but it’s nonsense
It’s one thing to merely stumble across someone’s private content on a PC while working on it, and quite another to actively seek it out and make a copy like the guys in the article were caught doing.
Thank you! I worked at Staples as an Easy Tech (2006) and we were required to search desktops for pedophile materials so we could report them to authorities when found. I never found any myself but that was policy back then.