The Geek Squad's ongoing porn problem

Bloggers catch the tech service pilfering porn and it turns into a local PR disaster, while Violet Blue wonders 'Is nothing sacred?'

Violet Blue, Special to SF Gate

Thursday, February 21, 2008

If you took your car in to have that mysterious noise diagnosed and fixed, would you expect the mechanics to rifle through your glove box and make copies of your Penthouse? Perhaps the more paranoid among us would make sure there was nothing naughty in our car before we brought it in for service — but what if we're talking about the repair people we give access to our personal computers, or to our homes?

As I reported back in December, members of the Geek Squad (possibly the best-known corporate computer repair service in the nation) got caught not only stealing porn off customers' hard drives (thanks to a three-month sting operation conducted by the Consumerist blog), but openly shared the porn with other Geek Squad employees. One such hard drive belonged to adult performer Jasmine Grey, whose elaborate victimization was only discovered when she died in a car crash and a guilt-racked Best Buy employee 'fessed up to the porn harvesting, divulging details in a confession to the Consumerist.

Earlier this month, Geek Squad employees in Palm Beach discovered porn on a customers' hard drive and handed the evidence over to the police, resulting in the arrest of a man for possession of child pornography (the second such Geek Squad instance within a month — another man in West Palm Beach was arrested for 76 counts of "possessing a photograph of sexual performance by a child."

No public statements have been made from the Geek Squad's PR department about the porn theft exposed by Consumerist, their exploitation of Jasmine Grey, or the Geek Squad's practice of examining their customers' files during the process of equipment repair.

That is, until the Customer Service is the New Marketing summit and conference here in San Francisco two weeks ago. The Geek Squad came with a team who hovered on a balcony over the conference while Geek Squad founder Robert Stephens took the stage for his talk, entitled "Marketing is a Tax You Pay for Being Unremarkable." Little did he realize that while he was onstage, there were full-on back-channel conversations on various social networking instant message sites about Geek Squad's nonconsensual "customer service."

So when it came time for Q & A, local blogger, respected social community management expert, professional social media insights consultant, Engadget columnist, and community manager for Pownce Ariel Waldman spoke up.

Rather than drop off Stephens at Kink.com for a lesson in respect at the (feminist-identified) boot heels of Princess Donna, Waldman asked Stephens for a statement in front of his peers, asking what kind of outreach the Geek Squad plans on doing to make their customers feel safe from exploitation like this in the future.

You can watch their exchange here at the 46:10 mark (the session was recorded by local GETV vlogger Eddie Codel). You can also see Waldman's take on his response to her question here:

"Robert's response immediately jumped into a cringe-worthy response, by saying first and foremost that bloggers are not journalists and don't ever hold themselves to the same standards as journalists. He then called out Ben Popken from Consumerist for asking for his response to these issues, but having already published the story. He said if bloggers publish the story first without waiting for his response that it's not a 2-way conversation and he just won't respond to it at all. He said bloggers will need to someday need to hold themselves to journalist standards because they have far too much competition to not to.

So, he didn't answer AT ALL about things they're trying to do to make people or their customers feel better about these issues. He was defensive about the question, instead of being sensitive to the issue, which was disappointing. If you're for enabling conversation within your company, you should be for enabling positive conversation online as well, instead of writing it off as bloggers only being a form of disrespectful trolls."

Personally, my reaction would have been to get on the Ocean with Princess Donna for an emergency takedown, followed by a trip to the Armory for some serious blogosphere discipline and knee-pad-needed lessons in sexual privacy. Followed by a dog-collar-and-leash march over to the Electronic Frontier Foundation for more sexual identity and privacy deprogramming.

According to Consumerist in the breakout post "Geek Squad Hatched Plot To Harvest Porn From Pornstar Jasmine Grey's Hard Drive, Days Before She Died In Car Crash," it wasn't an isolated employee (or 'one luggage handler,' as Stephens might say): An entire team passed Jasmine Grey's pictures around. The Geek Squad whistle-blower told Consumerist:

"I left for the day and came back the next day to find that one of our fellow employees had copied all of the files to a few DVD's and shared them with management, as well as most of the other techs.

Her webcam was still locking up her machine when she took her computer home that night, so she returned again in the morning. She still wouldn't provide us with her site (not that we needed it anyway at that point), but she did want to look into purchasing a new machine. At this point I handed her off to a PCHO rep who proceeded to convince her that instead of buying a new machine ... she should just have an Agent come out to fix it at her house (that way she 'could rest easy that her privacy would be assured'). The manager on duty at the time was involved in the scam, so he offered to send an Agent out for free to 'go the extra mile and insure she only shop at Best Buy in the future.' Of course, the Agent that came out to her house was none other than the same person who copied all her files to DVD. He fixed the webcam in a few minutes then spent the entire remainder of the appointment scouring her network for more porn, which he saved to a portable hard drive. Those files were then shared across the store."

Stephens' response would suggest that since mainstream media failed to cover any of this scandal, violation of sexual privacy — which seems to be an ongoing practice for both evil and good results — doesn't even merit a response.

Actually it deserves more than a response. Just because it's sex doesn't mean people's privacy can be violated or degraded for sport and without accountability. Just because we need to have some tech help doesn't mean we should be worried that our entire private lives — especially the sex parts — are going to get passed around for company amusement. Nor should we have to worry about what else the Geek Squad might do with the contents of our computers, whether it's laughing at my sex toy collection photos or turning my laptop over to a federal government agency because they interpret my last Survival Research Labs art show photos as "terrorist activity."

Porn is a sex toy; it's generally really lame and disappointing, but adult use of visual stimulation for personal erotic enjoyment is no less shameful than any other form of sexual expression, enjoyment or sexual self-reliance. Corporations need to send a message that they do not believe that sex is such an embarrassment that the mere mention of "sex" or "porn" automatically gives a free pass to their employees to steal from, degrade, exploit or humiliate a person daring to exhibit sexual interest. Good thing we have blogs to expose sexual douchebaggery — and to tell us how to make our computers catch people stealing our porn.

And stealing porn off computers when there's a whole Internet? Is nothing sacred!? Like, duh. I am so calling Princess Donna right now.

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Violet Blue is author and editor of nearly two dozen sexual health books and erotica collections. She is a professional sex educator, lecturer, podcaster, blogger, vlogger, porn/erotica reviewer and machine artist. She has written for outlets ranging from Forbes.com to O, The Oprah Magazine.

Violet is also a fetish model, a member of Survival Research Labs, an author at Metblogs San Francisco; girl friday contributor at Fleshbot.com, a San Francisco native and a Forbes Web Celeb. Her tech site is Techyum; her audio and e-books are at Digita Publications.

For more information and links to Web sites discussed in Open Source Sex, go to Violet Blue's Web site, tinynibbles.com.

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