Pedophile arresting....squad.

If only that would happen to carpking.

It's incredible this amounts of idiots with porn and nude pics of themselves who take their PC in to be serviced. PC technicians always look for porn on PC customers bring in.

I'm guessing the people who rely on Geek Squad are the ones who think deleting a file in the recycle bin destroys it for good.

Is that why I keep getting caught?

Not that I support child porn or anything, but isn't searching through someone's files illegal? I know you're handing off your laptop to get it serviced, but if someone simply wanted an anti-spyware or virus removal, how could you justify searching through their hard drive? I've never taken in a PC or laptop myself, so do you sign a disclaimer giving them full access rights to your hard drive or something? If not, it would seem like that would be evidence that would have been unlawfully obtained and violate the unreasonable searches clause of the constitution.

That's why they make you sign an agreement saying they have been allowed direct access to your files.

Ah, thanks for clearing that up, I didn't know that.

Based on other stories you hear of Geek Squad, you know at least someone has a copy on their flash drives now too.

so basically the summary of the article is:

yectiwan was searching through some guy's hard drive looking for porn to add to his collection. finding a promising directory named INCOME_TAX_RECORDS......

I bet you can tell from the folder size. A folder claiming to hold Word documents of real estate agreements shouldn't exceed 500 MB in size.

Except most people who own computers have :downs: and those folders are 500 MB because they have 2048x2048 BMP photos embedded into them.

They shouldn't be looking for this stuff anyway. Your computer has a whole hell of a lot of personal information on it, including passwords for a lot of sites; banking information, certainly online store sessions. Hell, if someone ever got a hold of my computer they could order whatever they wanted off of Amazon and I wouldn't find out about it for a month. The fact that they're even finding child pornography or infringing media files is proof that Geek Squad has absolutely zero integrity and cannot be trusted with the information we store on our computers.

Don't get me wrong. Geek Squad did the right thing... but also the horribly wrong thing. Basically what I'm trying to say is that they're good people but **** technicians.

I can't comment on any of the previous allegations or cases brought up about customer data or anything due to the terms of my employment with Best Buy and the Geek Squad.

However, I can say that if child pornography is discovered on a client's computer we are obligated both by policy and by law to report it to the authorities. We have a standard operating procedure that outlines the steps an employee is expected to take should such data be found.

We aren't supposed to be the data police. We aren't supposed to go fishing for anything, but if in the routine of repairing a computer we discover anything that even remotely tips us that there may be child pornography on a computer (such as a filename displayed in a command line virus scanner equating to child porn etc) an employee reports it to his direct manager who contacts the police. If it turns out to be nothing of alarm, then great. If it is something of a true concern then the police handle it from there and Best Buy is more or less out of the loop.

I intend this to be my only post on the topic. Tempted as I might be to lock it I'm going to leave it open for discussion as well.

People should be using the kid across the street to take care of their computer rather than forking over a ton of money for a simple job with the potential of all sorts of fishing as Jon explained.

What if the kid across the street find your child porn stash though? >__>

What if the kid across the street is in your child porn stash?

The moral here, people, is keep your porn off your windows partition.

This is what TrueCrypt is for... if I had to send in my PC, I'd clear my browsers' cookies and cache, and go through and move everything personal onto a TrueCrypt file. Then I'd go and use one of those programs with the 20 delete routines each used by a separate branch of the government to clean their hard drives and wipe the free space of my drives.

Of course, I wouldn't need to send my computer in anyways... if I can't fix it, and Google can't fix it, my OS install DVDs certainly can.

Aaron is stupid, just like Geek Squad.

That's like saying a thief is a good person because he saw a murder in the house he was about to rob and reported it to the police.

Agreed, though I'd go an extra step. If it was hardware failure that the Ultimate Boot CD couldn't diagnose, and I was tempted to take it in, I have a spare DBANed hard drive that I can put in. I'd take the hdd with all my personal information out of the computer. Also, I'd never take my computer in for software issues. If there are software issues that can't be solved through various tools built for it, such as HijackThis!, then it's time to backup and reformat.

I'm curious to as why wou would lock it. No one has broken any rules and it is a good discussion.

He does that anytime someone makes a comment that even hints an insult at Geek Squad. :downs:

Heh, let's all start bashing geek squad.

Although to be honest, I think the majority of Geek Squad's problems are more the fault of the industry than the company itself.

Not the fault of Geek Squad, the fault of Best Buy.

It's not an especially good discussion. It's completely one sided and regardless of the fact that in this instance the Geek Squad Agent did 100% the right thing, the company is still vilified because that's the cool thing to do when you don't understand that we don't cater to people even remotely like the members of this forum. Furthermore, no matter what I might say or attempt to convey on the subject there's seemingly no way to convince anyone that their viewpoint is skewed.

I find it amusing that people are saying, "This is why you should encrypt all your data" or "I always have a spare DBANed hard drive around" or "this is why you should only use the kid across the street for your computer problems". The average consumer wouldn't have any idea how to encrypt any data (face it, the general population can barely operate AOL let alone any drive encryption software -- even a simple solution like BitLocker that they can get BUILT IN to their operating system). They also don't have spare parts lying around (let alone drives secure erased... hell they can't even create a bootable floppy disk to utilize DBAN) nor do they have the knowledge or desire to install them if they did. And finally, the kid across the street is just as likely to steal your personal data as any technician at any company. Worse, he'll look at you differently and chuckle inside because he's seen your pasty white body in ways that even your significant other doesn't relish.

Thanks to the Consumerist it's become the cool trend to vilify Geek Squad because we're the biggest and easiest to target. But in reality the actions of a few don't represent the status of the whole. Broad sweeping statements like, "Geek Squad did the right thing but they also did the very wrong thing... they're **** technicians" are especially irritating. First, have you ever even RUN a tool like the McAfee Command Line Virus Scanner? Because if you had you'd know it displays each and every filename it scans. The Agent wouldn't even have to go looking for data if a file named, "5YO_RAEP_CP_OMG.JPG" flashed across the screen. That's literally all the proof we use to involve a manager and subsequently the police. Second, how can you even MAKE such sweeping judgment about the entire company? You have no basis for comparison. You can't possibly have insight to more than a handful of our employees, and using other people's experiences on the internet is hardly valid. Particularly if those experiences come from technical communities where the members wouldn't use our service regardless of what we did or didn't do. And as an aside, even the Consumerist is getting lambasted now every time they post about us. A witch hunt is only fun for so long and at this point they're scraping for something because it was the only thing bringing them hits. Funny how that works.

Oh, and the popular answer that everybody would like to think... "Because I can"

Yeah, but as a mod you can't lock a thread just because you don't like the way it's going, or if you don't think the member's opinions are fair or correct. This is not the Geeks Squad forums. You have to enforce the Massassi rules, not yours. The only one who could get away with that is the owner of Massassi. (Who owns Massassi now? I know Brian gave it to some one recently but I've forgotten who.)

And 'cmon, Yecti, maybe your Geek Squad location is really good, but most PC service centers are really unprofessional. And that's not just Geek Squad that's something you can say about almost any given repair shop. The only difference between geek squad and anywhere else, is that Geek Squad is owned by Best Buy and is loaded down by bunch policies that tie it's techs hands behind their backs.

You don't lock (or even threaten to lock) threads because they're one sided. You've got a vested interest, and I know you're mature enough to recognize that.

.

(For the record I posted this with indifference)

Yeah, Yecti, there hasn't been anything posted in this thread that would warrant it being closed other than your own personal feelings toward the matter. You already answered your own point. People will not change just because you want them to. And closing this thread does not do anything to change that.

Moving on to Geek Squad itself. It's terrible the type of people they have working for Geek Squad sometimes. As an old bluie, I can't even count the number of times where instead of a proper fix, they ship it to the manufacturer. That's what I call a scam. I'm sure there are plenty of decent techs, I knew a couple. But the vast majority are not close. Spending an hour letting some pre-scripted cleaning CD and giving it a once-over with a virus scanner is not adequate diagnosis for a computer that blue-screens. Anyone can ship their PC to a manufacturer. Anyone. Even complete 75 year old dunces can. To charge their silly rates for such a "service" is as I mentioned before, a scam.

However, in this situation, they are in the right to report the child pornography.

Oh it wasn't a threat. I didn't mean to construe it that way. It was mostly pointing out that the topic does indeed make me pretty uncomfortable, but regardless of that fact I intended to keep it open so long as it didn't turn into an all out bashfest.

Didn't you just have a thread locked because someone called you out on not really ever benching three hundred pounds, after you were called out because a 2 foot arc of electricity didn't really shoot out of your chair?


I'd say that this post henceforth kind of makes you a douche.

Yecti didn't start this thread, and thus doesn't have the right to close it because it isn't going the way he likes. I closed my own thread because there's a few people on this forum that seem to think reading a helldump thread on SA is some kind of insight into the truth, and can't seem to get over posting about it on massassi.

Not seeing the part where you aren't a hypocrite.

Yecti = moderator, and this is why he has the ability to lock this thread, but is expected to lock threads only if a rule has been broken.

JediKirby = Thread starter, and has the ability and right to lock a thread if it's just a crosspost from SA.

I can't wait until Massassians start going to jail for high-profile crimes. That'll be so fun. "OMG! That serial child molester looks an awful lot like Carpki- OMG! Could it be...?"

So wait.

You have a right to end discussion you don't like now?



I mean thats what you have your panties in a bunch over. But you just did the same thing more or less, and yecti didn't.

I agree with Yecti.

While the world is getting more tech savy, there are ALOT of people who don't know crap about the machines they use everyday and freak if it stops doing what it normaly does.

Places like Geek Squad are there for these people to charge them *** loads of money to tell them you were holding shift key.

Most if not all the people on these forums have a fair degree of computer knowledge and can see the stupidity that is displayed by dumb criminals, but meh.

now, if I was a random person I'd agree with the population, it seems fishy that a GS member would sniff around your files and look at your stuff, but we don't know what they actually do there, we don't know at all.

Yecti has told us what they do, and I've ran many things on my machine that search it for infections or I'm just looking for a specific file, it shows everything related to that file and it's name and location, doing visus scans scans EVERY file on the computer and shows you where that file is and what it's name is.

if something fishy pops up, then they investigate it, they don't exactly look for the files that say "credit card info" or "Banking Passwords".

if anything, people should me smarter about what they name things they don't want found. If I have my credit card on my computer or my baning passwords (which I admit... I do :() then they should name them nondescript things that anyone casually glancing at the file names would ignore.

This is sort of the point I was making.

Neckbeards: Okay, yeah, you have super-encrypted and multiply-erased hard drives sitting around but most people don't. Most people don't even know how to reinstall Windows. Geek Squad is their only option.

Yecti: Do you mean to tell me that the Best Buy techie was sitting in front of the computer during the virus scan, watching it? That doesn't sound very productive or likely.
I stand by my argument that Geek Squad can't be trusted with our data. Basically no computer technicians can be trusted, but that doesn't excuse Geek Squad for snooping around.

Frankly, I'm also horribly disappointed but not surprised that you would even consider locking this thread.

Can someone link me to this carpking thread? I don't see what all the buzz is about.