Geek Squad employee steals pics from customer’s PC, Best Buy gets sued

Posted May 8, 2008 at 01:14 PM by Sue Walsh

Section: Computers, Security, Gadgets / Other, Miscellaneous, Peripherals, Storage

A woman is suing Best Buy for $50,000 after a Geek Squad employee admitted viewing, and later stealing the nude photos she had on her PC. He copied them to his flash drive, shared them with his fellow employees and put them on the hard drives of other customers. While employee, William E. Giffels fully admitted to viewing and copying the photos to his flash drive, he claimed they ended up on other computers computers solely by accident when he forgot to delete them from the drive before allowing other employees to use it to access the diagnostic tools he also had stored on it. 

There hasn’t been any comment from Best Buy yet, but one can assume Mr. Giffels will be seeking new employment soon. While he is clearly in the wrong for what he did, you have to wonder why anyone would hand over a computer for repair without removing such sensitive and private content? When you think about it it could have been much worse. What if he had copied her banking or credit card info instead? I think the lesson here is if you have to take your PC in for repair, make sure there’s nothing on it you wouldn’t want the whole world to see!

Read [The Consumerist]