Slashdot Mirror
Consumerist Catches Geek Squad Stealing Porn
mekane8 writes "Consumer-advocate blog Consumerist ran a sting operation to catch a Best Buy Geek Squad member searching for and stealing media files from a customer's computer. The article includes the story with screen captures and a video of the technician's actions. From that piece: 'Reached for comment, Geek Squad CEO Robert Stephens expressed desire to launch an internal investigation and said, "If this is true, it's an isolated incident and grounds for termination of the Agent involved." This is not just an isolated incident, according to reports from Geek Squad insiders alleging that Geek Squad techs are stealing porn, images, and music from customer's computers in California, Texas, New Jersey, Virginia and elsewhere. Our sources say that some Geek Squad locations have a common computer set up where everyone dumps their plunder to share with the other technicians.' A related story from a former Geek Squad employee details the decline of the Geek Squad and Best Buy ethics in general."
It's hard for me to get worked up about this.
I doubt that these guys are obtaining and distributing files that couldn't be obtained for free using a good BitTorrent client (albeit also illegally). I mean, sure, most managerial types agree that you shouldn't do that stuff at work, but aside from the misuse of on-the-clock time, is it much different than a bunch of college roommates using a shared network directory for their downloads?
Stealing homemade sex videos and that sort of thing from customers' computers is another matter. That would be a pretty major invasion of privacy and should be grounds for substantial, per-case lawsuits. I suppose it would be hard for a corporate overseer to distinguish between "legit" and privately owned media in that situation.
Home videos? Private diaries? Love letters? Stay out, Geek. But "media" . . . as a customer, what have I lost, exactly? To be honest, I'd rather have a competent technician solve my configuration problems and help himself to my MP3 directory than have to waste time with ignorant first-level servicepeople in a tightly overseen, "theft-free" big-box environment.
I quit working for the Geek Squad about 8 months ago, and have since quit the IT field altogether, but I can safely say this was not an isolated incident. It was a common occurrence, at multiple locations I had worked at, to copy customer files onto flash drives or even burn them onto CDs. We also did have a computer set up at the store's expense for the sole purpose of caching whole copies of customer hard drives for "archival" if they purchased a data backup. (It was helpful as sometimes the customers would destroy the DVDs we burned for them and we were able to give them another set, but it was also routinely plundered with searches for *.jpg and so forth.)
This wasn't something I ever did, mainly because I had my own pornography to look at and never came across anything even remotely interesting in any other way, but other "Agents" would do it on a routine basis.
I more or less agree with you... however, the one difference is the invasion of privacy aspect. Like you say, who knows if those video files are porn, home videos, secret business files, whatever.
I ran a computer repair shop (note that I said "ran" not "worked at"), and this practice of "stealing" porn, music and movies was practically company policy. In fact, that's pretty much all we did. Ninety percent of repairs went like this:
1) Backup customer data (read: customer's porn, music, movies and various documents. Occasionally saved games)
2) Copy over WinXP syspreped mini-image, wiping hard drive.
3) Fix partition table.
4) Run through XP mini-install.
5) Grab any straggler updates.
6) Copy back customer data.
7) Delete crap we don't care about from backup.
8) At the end of the day, copy porn, music and movies that don't suck to my laptop and clean the image/backup server.
(In case you didn't realize, 90% of repairs are people who got so much spyware and viruses that a wipe is just faster. Especially with the mini-image (which is just a copy of XP/2k, fully updated, with all the various media players and firefox, that's been syspreped and shrunk down to the minimum (with ntfsresize on Knoppix). On first boot, XP will auto resize the fs to the maximum if the fs is smaller than the partition.))
This was some time ago (read: long enough ago that the statute of limitations applies), but I see no reason that it doesn't still work like that. I mean, come on, it's faster than bittorrent.
Disclaimer: I worked at Best Buy as a PC tech from 1996 to 1998, seasonally (this was well before Geek Squad days). I was 16 when I started. I saw a lot of crazy stuff, both from customers and from our management (most of the managers were let go at one point, supposedly because they had been DEALING COCAINE...but that's just hearsay.)
I am always surprised when I see stuff like this -- shock and astonishment that retail PC techs aren't complete pros. That's not to say that there weren't some good techs there -- there were. But there were also bad techs, because the management at a story like Best Buy knows about retail sales and (hopefully) customer service. They cannot tell the difference between a good tech and someone who can just talk like a good tech, but they do know that, if we were really great techs, we wouldn't have been working at Best Buy. Other posters have mentioned bad behavior as a natural result "bottom of the food chain" and "low-paid" employeees.
We weren't the bottom of the food chain. The sales floor guys were - especially in the computer department. They wanted our jobs. I routinely had guys in their mid-twenties give me shit because I was 16 and had a better job. I wasn't making more than they were since I was seasonal, but that was okay with me. I was making decent money for being 16 in 1996 (about $8 an hour, I think) and the job was as tied to merit as it could have been. If I fixed computers well and quickly, I got a good review and customers left happy. Since a lot of our customers expected to have a miserable experience dealing with us, it was actually a pretty good feeling to make somebody's day and fix in an hour what they thought they'd have to come back for in a week.
I only worked summers and over Christmas, so every time I came back, I had to "prove myself" again as the other full-time techs had invariably either been fired or else moved on to better gigs. For every full-time guy there who knew a lot and showed me a trick or two, there was a guy there three times my age who didn't know anything other than how to reinstall windows, and who resented the smartass 16-year-old who made him look bad. Most of these guys lasted only a couple months, but every now and then you'd get somebody who could weasel their way into the job and manage not to be a bad employee even if they were a bad tech. The fact is that a lot of the "repair" jobs we got back then were really basic. An un-scientific analysis of what I remember the job was like saw maybe one or two machines over an 8 hour shift that actually needed hardware work we were capable of; the rest were OS issues, software problems, driver problems, or else they were hardware issues that we had to send out to our service center. The bad techs just sent more stuff out to service, which wasn't really encouraged since we got a happier customer and probably a better profit margin for our store if we fixed it in-house rather than sending it to a regional service center.
At the end of the day, though, we had a lot of autonomy. The second summer I was there was the best one -- they'd fired all but one of the other techs and (for whatever reason) had a hard time replacing them, so it was just me and this one laid-back dude fixing just about everything, and since we were both pretty good, we got the same amount of work done with half the manpower. The managers rarely enforced the "regional" policies as to how we were supposed to do things (if there even were any) so long as our numbers were good.
Best Buy as a company has about as much oversight of their techs as Honda or VW have of their dealership techs. They're hired locally and monitored locally (if at all). They can try to set some standards for who to hire (realy easy things like A-Plus certification) but it doesn't change the fact that it's a low-ish level job unless you're a masochist and you want to use it as a stepping stone to management.
So I'm not surprised by any of this, but I don't really hold Best Buy responsible unless they knew about it and did
Prying into the personal documents of your customers is not the least bit in a "grey area".
The only way to reduce the demand is to eliminate all humans.
We are driven by basic desires. One of these desires is to ensure that we are genetically related to the children that we spend our resources in rearing. Prior to contraception, the best way to achieve that was to impregnate a woman as soon as she is capable of being impregnated. Sooner is wasted energy (from a biological perspective, because she won't end up pregnant), and later runs the risk that someone else (the alpha male perhaps; we are tribal/herd-like still) has previously impregnated her and #2 will be rearing #1's child, not his own.
The problem with the above factual analysis is that women reach biologically reproductive age much sooner than the law allows them to be sexually active.
Yes, there are sickos out there who create and consume abuse of infants and 8-year-olds. That does not mean that we should, as a society, attempt to cause the greatest amount of collateral damage while bringing these abominations of life to justice!
My great-great-great-grandmother was legally married at 13. Our laws have changed; our bodies have not.
I hope that it is plain that nowhere in here am I defending those who abuse children, create child porn, or distribute and use it. I'm simply stating that creating laws that outlaw possession of anything (including drugs, books, and money[1]) makes it very easy to punish someone who hasn't actually committed a crime.
[1]--If you don't declare that you're taking more than $10,000 through an airport (perhaps only for international flights, I'm not positive), the police are allowed to take it. Similarly, the RICO laws allow them to plant some coke in your car, then confiscate the car and sell it at auction; even if you have the ability to defend yourself legally, the car is gone. Same goes with houses, yachts, and other large-value items; there have been documented cases of abuse of this law, so I'm again ashamed that we allow it to persist. It is blatantly unconstitutional, as are the drug laws; back in the 20's it took a Constitutional Amendment to outlaw alcohol, but we've allowed our rights to erode so much that we even outlawed the amino acid Tryptophan (naturally occurring in turkey, as we experience every Thanksgiving) for almost ten years (1991 to 2002).
I agree that eliminating the demand would make the supply less profitable. That works with all commodities. But you've gotta change biological nature (not even human nature; all organisms want to maximize their resource expenditures on their own genes, and minimize said expenses on others' genes (yes, adoption and "altruism" are exceptions, but you'll generally find a self-serving motive for the latter, perhaps as simple as "feeling better", and the former is usually the path of last resort when unable to bear children of one's own, celebrities excepted)). And we haven't done such a good job at eliminating demand of any of the "vices" that we've made illegal; alcohol prohibition helped create the mafia, and current drug prohibition is dividing our populace and disenfranchising far more blacks than it does whites (by making drug crimes felonies, and selectively prosecuting, we are taking away their right to vote).
And, sure, forget that digital images are numbers; forget the idea of taking things at their lowest level. Let's look at the highest level: we are imprisoning people because they possess evidence that a crime was committed. They had nothing to do with the crime. Again, this scares me because it can be abused so easily. And since it's linked to the "won't somebody think of the children" meme, using it as planted evidence will likely always be a way to control unpopular-but-not-illegal people.
Like, for instance, a rival senator.
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.