I strongly suspect both he and his father are corrupt and guilty of very serious crimes, but I do have some sympathy for Hunter’s claim that people didn’t have a right to snoop around on his laptop.
If you take your suit to the dry cleaner and forget about it, after some length of time the dry cleaner owns the suit and can sell it or throw it away or whatever they want. Something similar seems to apply at laptop repair shops. If you leave it there long enough, the shop owns it.
It’s not clear to me that means they can snoop around on it.
Common decency should prevent a person from snooping around on someone else’s laptop, but it should go further than that. There should probably be legal protections for your data. If I find somebody’s phone, I’d be a creep if I took their photos and posted them on the internet, but it should also be illegal.
If Hunter was an EU resident, it probably would be illegal to use the data that way. They have a lot stricter rules regarding the protection of data across the pond.
Here in the states, not so much. It’s strange to me that he wouldn’t have a hard drive with encryption on it–rendering the data unreadable. All of my work computers and my personal laptop have BitLocker on them. I bricked my personal laptop with some security software I was developing, and to boot it into safe mode I had to provide the BitLocker crypto key…which thankfully Office 365 had a copy of.
The reporting of the laptop says the repair guy didn’t wait the 90 days of the contract, but started snooping the day after he received it.
I would say our data should be private. Should they be allowed to snoop on bank statements, 401k statements, etc? I think not.
It’s a tough one. In principle, I agree that just because someone has my device in their possession, they aren’t entitled to the data on that device. Ethically, anyone familiar with how devices and data work is well aware that the physical object and the data contained on it are regarded as different properties by the owner.
But unless a law has specifically been written to deal with that distinction, I don’t really see how legally someone who contractually has gained possession of a “thing” is not entitled to the use of all parts of that “thing.” (That’s assuming that he did wait out the contractual time period, and didn’t, as smitemouth says, start snooping into things long before he could possibly have had any legal claim on it.) It might stink on an ethical level, but it might be perfectly legal.