University of Guelph study sent 12 laptops to repair shops in three Ontario cities. In some cases, private information such as passwords and revealing photos were copied to external devices
Privacy violations at computer repair shops are “absolutely jarring,” says a professor involved in a new study, which found half of all stores tested in three Ontario cities unnecessarily accessed customers’ personal information.
The study is scheduled to be presented next summer in San Francisco at the Symposium on Security and Privacy, organized by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, which peer-reviewed the research.looked at laptops that were brought to 12 different repair shops from October to December in 2021. Researchers anonymized the collected data but told The Globe and Mail these shops are all in Ontario.
The devices were set up with different accounts, such as those for e-mail and gaming, and populated with browser history across several weeks. Researchers also added a cryptocurrency wallet, as well as personal documents and files. Mr. Ceci, who is cited as the lead author for the study, acknowledged that the sample size could seem small. “But the goal of the study is not to establish the percentage of how many repairs result in shops snooping on customers,” he said. “It is to find out and definitively state if the snooping happens at all.”
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