Furniture Rental Co. Spies on Rental PC Users

rwmidl

Yahoo News: Furniture Rental Co. Spies on Rental PC Users

I'd be really interested to see how this plays out in the courts. While technically the pc is still the property of the rental company, should the renter expect some level of privacy?

ehnde

They should have the good sense to not rent-to-own things. That, the lottery, scratch tickets, and payday loans is stuff that poor people do. I'm not knocking being poor, just the bad habits that put people needlessly into poverty.

mikedisd2

The publicity from this must surely affect their revenue. Despite the outcome, this may be a big enough injury for them to change their practice. Or maybe not.

hex_omega

Well, this feels weird.

I'm not sure if I can get into trouble for this, but I work for this company and I am one of the computer techs that installs this software on our merch everyday.

And I absolutely hate the software. Not becuase of what it can do or how dangerous it is in the wrong hands. But it's buggy as all hell.

dales

Yes I guess it should be alot more obvious to renters that this is occuring, but I do kind of see it from the other side too. What if the renter was using it for illegal purposes. Rent a computer for a short time {insert illegal activity here} send back to company. It could cause all sorts of havoc for the company involved.

Not really sure why anyone would want to rent a computer in the first place though. They are cheap as chips these days and second hand ones are more than adequate for what most people need them for.

erpadmin

dales wrote: »

Yes I guess it should be alot more obvious to renters that this is occuring, but I do kind of see it from the other side too. What if the renter was using it for illegal purposes. Rent a computer for a short time {insert illegal activity here} send back to company. It could cause all sorts of havoc for the company involved.

I'm pretty sure we'd be getting into "fruit from the poisonous tree" issues...any evidence that is gathered from an illegal tap (which would be a violation of the Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution) would be thrown out of court.

However, that doesn't mean it is a good idea for the po' folks to go renting computers....I would NEVER want to be subjected to that kind of crap. Then again, I don't need to "rent-to-own" either...

arwes

Well that's certainly going to be a large settlement.

RobertKaucher

I find this exceptionally unethical. Placing a spycam in a person's home is disturbing as hell. All I can say is look at Sony. This is just completely disturbing and ill conceived. Let me ask you guys: what is the primary security concern of every company out there in the world?

Rogue employees who take data home (where it is stoled from their car/house), to another employer, or just sell it on the black market. How many of you know some fellow admin who has snooped in someone's inbox when they should not have?

There are certain lines that just should not be crossed.

MickQ

Reminds me of the school district in the US which did a siniste^W similar thing not so long ago.

earweed

Regardless of if the people were wise to use rent to own....
Aarons definitely overstepped the boudaries by installing this stuff on their computers. If they want protection from people not paying off the computers and skipping town with them then I'm sure there is available software for that purpose without going to the lengths of Aarons being able to photograph the user.

colemic

mikedisd2 wrote: »

The publicity from this must surely affect their revenue. Despite the outcome, this may be a big enough injury for them to change their practice. Or maybe not.

Is the software ever removed, upon the computer being paid off?

networker050184

colemic wrote: »

Is the software ever removed, upon the computer being paid off?

If you read the article it states that there are pieces soldered onto the mobo that can only be disabled by a wand. I doubt they are having people bring their computers back in for this process.

colemic

I did read the article - but who has the wand? Aaron's? When (if) does that happen, that's what I was asking. I think it would depend on whether there was any informed consent to the monitoring, disclosure, etc. It wouldn't be out of the realm of possibility that the documentation (if there is any provided to the customer) would tell them to bring it back in to have it removed. Since the individual works there, I was asking him/her if they ever did any disabling.

demonfurbie

its like pawning a computer with your quicken file on it .... yea we all know how that ends up but people do it daily

colemic

Lawsuit Against Computer Rental Company Raises Privacy Questions | CNSnews.com

A little more info... Aaron's is claiming they never authorized their franchises to use the software.

hex_omega

networker050184 wrote: »

If you read the article it states that there are pieces soldered onto the mobo that can only be disabled by a wand. I doubt they are having people bring their computers back in for this process.

There is nothing like that done. Everything is installed from within Windows, into the registry. A customer could just format their hard drive and re-install Windows to get around it.