Laptop repair shop exposed - essential viewing

In a long overdue journalistic endeavour Sky sent in an undercover reporter to several laptop repair shops with a simple known fault and a laptop loaded with spy software to see what the repair shops got up to.

It will come as no surprise that they trawled through files and folders, attempted to access online banking account and more.

There is something important to understand here. You simply cannot give a computer to an unknown repair agent. Your laptop is not the same as another appliance as it far more that just hardware. It is akin to inviting a person to repair your office, letting them take all your bank books, photos and diaries off premises for investigation.

So what can you do? Some ideas include: buy laptops where you maintain the ownership of the hard drive, so in the event of a repair you keep you hard drive; create a second login called 'guest' with no data on it and only allow repair agents to use this login (please note this is not foolproof); establish a relationship with a respectable repair company and have them sign a privacy/NDA type contract. If you need help keeping your data private contact FaberBrent.

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