If you live in the Pukekohe area of Auckland, and need some work done on your PC, please don’t get it done at Dot Net Ltd, especially if you are considering a Hard Drive upgrade - your personal data might just end up being sold to someone like me …
A few days ago I needed to buy a Hard Drive in a hurry, so I popped down to mylocal PC shop in Pukekohe and paid well over the odds ($90 NZD) for an 80GB SATA model.
When I got home and put it in the PC I was building I was shocked to see that this drive was second hand. $90 is expensive for a new drive of that size, never mind an old one! But more shocking than this was the fact that it still had some poor family’s data on it. There I was looking at the Windows XP log-in screen asking me whether I would like to log-in as “Stuart”, “Kim”, or “The Kids”.
I was seriously considering logging into the machine, trying to find some contact details for “Stuart” and phoning him up to see what he thought of the situation, but in the end I decided against it. I wish I hadn’t now.
When I took the drive back and complained, the staff member apologised and said “I’m sorry about that, it should have been formatted”. I nearly fell over when I heard that. I only hope that when she took it to one of the more technical members of staff to format they put her straight. My efforts seemed to fail.
I wish I had contacted Stuart now, and told him what had happened, because I’m pretty sure that his personal data is once again sat on a shelf waiting to be purchased at a highly inflated price to the next person who comes along to buy a HDD from this company. Let’s just hope they aren’t a criminal.