Imagine this — You have a raunchy video of your honeymoon get away with your newly wedded wife in your 3-year-old Pentium 4 PC. Suddenly, your video card dies but you don’t know and send it to your friendly computer repairman. In the process of repairing your PC, he discovers your video and posts it online. Question is, does he have the right to invade your privacy? Well, in this case probably no. Not in the case of this Pennsylvania man, Kenneth Sodomsky.
He had sent his PC to a repairman to fix a DVD burner problem. The IT guy was searching for videos in the man’s computer to test the burner. Apparently, he discovered scores of child pornographic material on the hard disk. He later reported the incident to the authorities which led to the arrest of Sodomsky.
The question lingers. Was the IT guy invading Sodomsky’s privacy by snooping into his hard disk?
Source: ZDnet.com
3 responses so far ↓
1 Darran // Dec 22, 2007 at 4:04 pm
That is why you are advised to reformat the whole computer before sending for a repair. The repairman have all the access to your hard disk and I wouldn’t be surprised if he sneaked in on your privacy. Be it huge corporations like Sony or Fujitsu, I don’t trust any of them. The best policy is to clear everything there is to be cleared.
2 FoxTwo // Dec 22, 2007 at 6:34 pm
Well, it’s the same moral dilemma present in other professions as well.
Let’s say you’re a Catholic priest, and you’re at the confessional. A guy comes in, confesses to killing somebody. Do you report him?
Hard to define though. In the repairman case, I am inclined to agree that the guy should be arrested, but that’s just my opinion.
3 Aaron // Dec 22, 2007 at 8:09 pm
Perhaps the law is larger than the individual rights when it is for illegal actions?
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