A recently passed law requires that Texas computer-repair technicians have a private-investigator license, according to a story posted by a Dallas-Fort Worth CW affiliate.
In order to obtain said license, technicians must receive a criminal justice degree or participate in a three-year apprenticeship. Those shops that refuse to participate will be forced to shut down. Violators of the new law can be hit with a $4,000 dollar fine and up to a year in jail, penalties that apply to customers who seek out their services.
Here’s the law text.
That seems excessive. But I’m saying that as the owner of a computer-repair company. You have to wonder what ends it serves. Is it to protect the consumer so that the service technician knows that they can’t trawl through customers emails? Is it to help the prosecutors where a trained technician could better spot the warning signs and alert them to a potential perpetrator.
This becomes significant with the stories about computer repair companies in the US being sued for illegally accessing customer data. Technicians have to be told this – customer data is sacrosanct. You don’t look at it. It’s illegal.
But where can you draw the line? Can you look but not see? Can you examine the problems in someone’s computer without some sort of awareness of the kinds of data there? How do you fix an email problem on a computer without seeing the names of senders and the titles of emails?
That’s really appalling. What they’re basically doing is virtually deputizing repair techs into law enforcement. This gets really, really ugly. If a repair tech was known to repair computer X that is later confiscated for any reason by The Law, that tech is open to legal liabilities regarding what might have been on the PC at the time he/she touched it. There should be an uproar over this.
I think there is a Class Action suit about it.
Seems excessive and rediculous to me. What ever happened to the idea of professionalism – How many other walks of life have the same access to data like pc repair centres.
Its a joke to me.