There was an interesting item in the TechCrunch article today. Repair techs scan computers for known message digests / hashes of child porn images and videos. So they don’t need to look at the drive contents, just create hashes and compare against known illegal content. Is that correct?
I’ve not heard that before and it strikes me that would require a LOT of computing power and time.
Interesting that the service agreement grants you permission to look through the drive to find information to get the asset back to it’s owner. I didn’t know that clause was in the agreement.
The clause is pretty standard among services that I’ve seen. If it’s not explicit, it’s implied.
Here’s Apple’s - see section 1.11: https://www.apple.com/legal/sales-support/terms/repair/generalservice/servicetermsen/ It’s not specifically called out, but read between the lines.
As for directly scanning for child pr0n images, few servicing companies actually do it. The tools do exist, but they are limited in ability and scope (and there’s some ugly legal implications that can arise when using those.) Such scanners are more commonly used by large corporate internal security packages. Incidentally, most of the time that child pr0n is discovered in a service setting, it’s by a technician attempting to do data recovery (in which you have to check files to see if the files came back okay) or virus scanning (as many child pr0n files and acquisition software reportedly either contains viruses or use virus-like cloaking systems to try to hide and therefore set off alarms).
Best Buy’s service agreement specifically says that the company will be scanning your files as part of their servicing (legitimately, again for virus detection purposes if nothing else) and that if illegal materials are found, the authorities will be informed.