An acquaintance, who is an attractive young woman, is having a problem with her relatively new Dell Laptop, purchased at the start of the school year, and is now showing a fairly large black spot on the screen, right in the middle. My friend, Jesse, who is computer savvy, was on the phone with me while Elisa had Dell Support on chat. Jesse and I both had a “WTF?” moment when the chat person asked her to let him take over her computer, and we both told Elisa to tell him he wouldn’t be able to see dead pixels on her screen from his screen, so there was no point in him doing that.

Apparently this isn’t the first time this has happened to her, a young woman with an obviously feminine name. The last guy told her she was really cute, after he activated her webcam remotely so he could see her, which was an amazingly ballsy thing to do. I suspect the second CS rep was intent on doing the same thing, since there is no way in hell he’d be able to see any dead pixels on her screen by accessing remotely.

This is an incredible invasion of privacy. It’s also points up a lot of repercussions. It’s possible these guys are just woof-woofs looking to catch sight of the skin they’ll never be allowed to touch. it’s also possible they’re criminally minded, and they have access to all your information. Whether they’re looking to catch a good bit of video to sell to the nudie sites, or casing your living room to see if you have valuables, you do NOT want this happening.

And it makes me feel that a built in webcam is the one feature I might not want on any new box I buy. If it’s a peripheral, it can be unplugged before getting in touch will Dell Customer Service. Or any other computer CS for that matter. I doubt the Dell CS reps are the only ones doing this.

Technorati Tags: Dell Customer Service, Invasion of Privacy, Web Privacy, remote computer access, built in web cam

This entry was posted on Monday, June 9th, 2008 at 5:15 pmunder Web News, Web Security and . Comment RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.