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Question

protection vis IT support snooping?

Dec 31, 2014 3:44PM PST

I have my laptop under warranty, & need to take it in for repair of its dvd drive. In preparation for undertaking the all too-important backup (thanks Bob), I also wish to avoid a problem that occurred previously—very probable IT support staff performing undesirable sniffing around in my hard disk.

At that time, I was under considerable time pressure to take the (other) machine in for repair, & neglected to think of it, until too late. Now I have more time (& a different machine), and do not wish to make the same mistake.

What can I do to prevent very probable snooping by IT support staff? In other words, some preventive security, only vis-a-vis IT support staff, as opposed to possible unwarranted hackers?

Discussion is locked

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Answer
Re: snooping
Dec 31, 2014 5:37PM PST

A good repair shop shouldn't look to the contents of your hard disk when replacing a dvd-drive.

There might be exceptions such as reporting child porn they happen to stumble upon to the police. If those pictures are on the desktop of the only userid you gave them access to test the machine, it's obvious, but I wouldn't call that snooping.

Just remove all really sensitive files from the machine before taking it to them. Put them on a USB-stick and keep that safely at home.

Kees

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Answer
not much you can do
Jan 1, 2015 10:32AM PST

even if you remove files, it still can be found using different free tools such as recuva. you can password protect but a boot to a linux live disk can be used to bypass it, and I can go on.

just about the only thing you can do is if you have a second harddrive, take out the current one and install the second one then put an operating system on it. use linux or win10 on it since both are free and guarantee not to have any microsoft genuine issue. The only real disadvantage of doing this is it would depend on what is wrong with the drive they are checking out. If it turned out to be a software issue, there is no way for them to test it with your real os.

one thing to note, you can check the last time a picture or file was accessed. http://www.groovypost.com/howto/microsoft/enable-last-access-time-stamp-to-files-folder-windows-7/