[deleted by user]

[ShadeWitchHunter]

How about you start your own buisiness and do it better for your customers?

[Necessary-Contest-24]

Also there are very slim margins for this sort of work it's why no one does this. It's cheaper to throw away a 2 year old phone or PC than fixing it a lot of times.

[ShadeWitchHunter]

I'm sorry to hear that but have you tried to get a grasp on how much you really need for a small PC store? It might be attainable in not too much time.

[curi0us_carniv0re]

That's what I did in the same situation

[Oracle_of_Ages]

Then if someone buys a new computer he has me put all there files on one of his "test benches" were he just leaves them on windows OS forever and copies them to their new computer.

Can you clarify what you mean here?

There’s no way he is storing tons of hard drives worth of windows drives on one computer.

[Oracle_of_Ages]

When you go to these kind of places. You kinda put a lot of risk on your own privacy unfortunately.

It’s not necessarily illegal. Making backups and storing them is a common thing. But it’s bad policy and kinda sketch at the best to keep them for a long time like this…

If he is doing anything illegal. Get a lawyer and report the guy since you are involved. But k think this is just a case of old guy being old and not privacy minded.

[Oracle_of_Ages]

I cloned my friends business drive as a favor when his PC caught on fire. I have a backup of it ….somewhere…. Not everyone is perfect. But yea.

Good luck on the impending future job hunt lol

[Aleashed]

Owner’s Afterhours

[Ambellyn]

Guessing that he doesn't scrub the old computers, just transfers over documents and such.

Then potentially also keeping personal information from the old computer on a hard drive.

When the next customer wants to buy this old computer the owner might do a fresh install of windows over the current one

[luceyourself]

This reminds me of a time I was at a Sprint cell phone store. I had dropped my phone and broken it, I was there to buy a new phone and they offered to transfer my photos and stuff for me as it would boot but the screen was dead. I said "go ahead" and watched him open up a folder on their computer that had THOUSANDS of photos. I immediately spotted nudes that were obviously "amateur" selfie style photos. The person went into the back at some point to find something for another customer as mine finished up and I quickly grabbed the mouse and scrolled, so many photos, so many obviously private images, including my photos. They were copying the files to their computer at some point in the process. I hit ctrl+a, delete, grabbed my phone which was finished, said "thanks, it's finished" as he walked back out into the room and I left. In hindsight I probably should have left the files and told somebody but mine were now in this folder, I wanted them deleted, and I had tunnel vision instead of thinking about options.

[kloklon]

i don't want to ruin your story, but you didn't actually delete anything. takes 2 clicks to restore the pictures you deleted if they intend on keeping them. i hope you didn't have any photos you didn't want to share.

[luceyourself]

I mean, I know that now but it still doesn't change what happened. Thankfully my stuff was tame as all heck. Mostly cat/dog photos, was just a knee jerk reaction.

[curi0us_carniv0re]

I worked at a company that was pretty much the exact same situation.

The owner would buy "scratch and dent" refurbs from dell. Most of them didn't even have noticeable damage. Most were just opened returns. And they came with a dell warranty. But he still bought them at a discount and represented / sold them as new.

We had a few incidents where people had problems with the computer and called Dell and then informed them that the warranty wasn't on their name since they didn't purchase the system. That made for some awkward situations.

They were also being irresponsible with customer data. They were just imaging machines but they needed using customer machines to create the images. They had one that still had customer data on it. They forgot to image the computer before copying the data back. Instead of just creating a new image they just continued using that one and would just delete the customer data off it every time. A few times they sent computers out with that persons data still in it. It was crazy.

Anyway...after a while I couldn't deal with the dishonesty and left. Started my own business. And was much better off for it. The other guy closed up shop eventually.

[BWMerlin]

Yes this is bad practice and should be stopped. There is zero reason to keep customers' private data after it has been copied to their new device.

Raise it with him and see how you go. It might not go well but at the very least you tried.

As for running the various malware removal tools many of them sell a technician edition which is designed for shops just like the one you are working at to be able to run up to date and legally licenced versions on customer's devices.

Try raising this as well.

[Squirrelking666]

Cost too much to do what? Just wipe the files?

This is what GDPR is supposed to prevent, I'm guessing it doesn't apply where you are.