UPDATED: PC Rental Company Spied on Users In Their Homes With Webcams

[woo me with science]

Source: DailyTech

....In December, the store manager showed up at the couple's house with an order to repossess the computer. And he carried with him a far more disturbing item -- a picture taken from the computer's web cam inside the couple's home, which Aaron's had been using as a remote spy cam. He claimed the picture was "evidence".

The Byrds were appalled and called the police. A police investigation revealed that Aaron's employees "routinely installed the PC Rental Agent" on rent-to-own laptops. The PC Rental Agent, a product of DesignerWare, was capable of regularly taking pictures of users, taking screenshots, and logging their key presses -- all without the user ever realizing it.

.....

The company has 1,140 stores in the U.S. and Canada and made $123.6M USD in calendar 2011. So a class action lawsuit involving all of the chain's computer-buying customers has the potential to be huge.

....

By contrast, the Aaron's case appears even stronger (than the suit in Lower Merion last year). The Lower Merion School District at least informed parents in their contract that they were being monitored. It does not appear that Aaron's does so with its customers.



Read more: http://www.dailytech.com/PC+Rental+Company+Spied+on+Users+In+Their+Homes+With+Webcams/article21538.htm

---

Here we go again.

We were told secret remote webcams were no big deal in the Lower Merion School District, because school personnel would never have time to spy on students.

Gee, I wonder if rental company employees have time to spy on customers?

.

[RKP5637]

1. Disgusting! Our privacy laws are back in the Stone Age. Wakeup Congress! n/t

[woo me with science]

25. This is key.

Weren't there bills being introduced after the Lower Merion fiasco to update the laws to include video as well as audio spying?

I don't know what came of that.

[RKP5637]

28. Bills were introduced according to below, but no idea what the final result was ...

"U.S. Senate Judiciary Subcommittee hearing
Senator Arlen Specter

Senator Arlen Specter (D-PA) held a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Drugs, which he chairs, on March 29, 2010, on the use of student-issued computers to allegedly spy on students in their homes.<136> Specter said: "The issue is one of surreptitious eavesdropping. Unbeknownst to people, their movements and activities were under surveillance."<136>

Specter said he believes existing wiretap and video-voyeurism statutes do not adequately address concerns in today's era of widespread use of cell-phone, laptop, and surveillance cameras.<137> After hearing testimony at the hearing from Blake Robbins and others, Specter said that the testimony and Lower Merion's use of laptop cameras for surveillance had convinced him that new federal legislation was needed to regulate electronic privacy.<137><138><139>

Specter then introduced legislation in April 2010 to amend the federal Wiretap Act to clarify that it is illegal to capture silent visual images inside another person's home. Specter said: "This is going to become law. You have a very significant invasion of privacy with these webcams, as more information is coming to light."<34><140> Speaking on the floor of the Senate, he said:

Many of us expect to be subject to ... video surveillance when we leave our homes and go out each day—at the ATM, at traffic lights, or in stores, for example. What we do not expect is to be under visual surveillance in our homes, in our bedrooms, and, most especially, we do not expect it for our children in our homes.<29>"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbins_v._Lower_Merion_School_District

[woo me with science]

32. Thank you. nt

[meegbear]

2. Reminds me of the story of the car rental place ...

they installed GPS trackers in the cars and "fined" them if they went over the speed limit.

[TransitJohn]

3. Here's a link to the local article I was reading this morning.

http://trib.com/news/local/casper/article_0f189a64-bf33-51f5-8fb5-9bc5dc7928fd.html

[woo me with science]

24. Very disturbing article...Thank you.

"When reached by phone, DesignerWare owner Tim Kelly said he couldn’t comment on the lawsuit. Kelly said he had only recently learned that the complaint had been filed.

On the PC Rental Agent website, the company states its device is “absolutely” legal. It tells clients they can decide for themselves whether to inform customers about the monitoring product.

“Some rent-to-own dealers like to make their customers aware of it, thinking this will help defer them from doing acts that would force them to activate the Agent,” the website states. “Others don’t reveal it.”

The Byrds say they were never told about the device or monitoring software."


.

.
.
I wonder how many companies are selling this kind of software and telling their customers that it's perfectly legal not to inform people about it.

[KurtNYC]

4. putting opaque tape over the webcam on mine right now....

:tinfoilhat:

[leveymg]

5. There's other spyware that allows remote recording of what you look at, what you write, and where

you surf.

Just keep that in mind, too.

[4lbs]

6. This is why one should just wipe the drive clean and reinstall everything.

[UnrepentantLiberal]

7. Or just just restore your computer to factory settings.

Very easy to do.

[mahatmakanejeeves]

8. Yeah, but

since Aaron's is the computer's owner, it surely made itself the adminstrator, if the computer is running XP or something like that. The renter is probably just a user, who lacks the privileges needed to alter the operating system.

[JesterCS]

12. lol

easy to bypass that stuff if you know windows.

[FiveGoodMen]

17. And people who don't know windows that well deserve to have their privacy violated?

[quakerboy]

20. Where do your factory setting reside?

Used to be you got a windows disc from the manufacturer, but now days its an image on the HD. How hard is it to alter the image on the HD to contain a new program that will be included in any restore, you ask?. Turns out, not all that hard if you have the desire and a competent IT guy.

[ikri]

13. Rumour has it

That Aaron's had installed something physically on the computer's motherboard that would make it extremely hard to wipe & reinstall, like soldering components to the board to make switching drives impossible & locking down the BIOS so the computer would only boot from the primary hard drive.

[quakerboy]

21. At a guess, most people

at the level of paying Aarons for a computer on an installment plan probably don't have the knowledge base to do that, or even to think of doing that.

[4lbs]

33. Just pay some high school kid $40, a coke, and a bag of Doritos. He'll be done in an hour.

[quakerboy]

34. so 2 months worth of payments?

People with spare cash dont shop at Aarons.

[bongbong]

9. Free Enterprize RULEZ!

Corporations only have our best interests in mind.

[woo me with science]

10. Interesting that some weren't bothered at all by this

when it was a public school district doing it.

[Name removed]

14. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[woo me with science]

26. We should all be. nt

[KittyWampus]

29. I remember that well. I think there was ONE DU'er who defended the school.

[woo me with science]

30. There were at least two I can think of offhand

who were *extremely* vocal and defensive of the school.

There were posts from others from time to time, supporting aspects of their arguments.

[JesterCS]

11. disable the webcam or put tape over it.

or be smarter than the average PC user and know whats going on with the computer. Again it's still wrong that Aaron's did this. Maybe its just me but im a stickler for what is on my computer and what is running. Im a minimalist since I play PC games.

First thing I'd do if i got a RTO laptop is wipe the thing and install fresh copy of windows. Who knows whats on there

[quakerboy]

22. Where would you get your fresh copy of windows?

If you needed to resort to RTO to get your system, I doubt you have an extra 200 sitting around to buy an extra copy of windows.

[JesterCS]

31. Well usually there is a a sticker or sleeve with a CD key, even with RTO n/t

[Occulus]

35. Usually there's a Windows license key on a sticker on the laptop itself.

All you have to do is download or borrow a copy of an exactly matching version of the OS and use the laptop's key. Microsoft doesn't care where the installation copy came from as long as you have a license key that is valid for that version of the OS. The installation media itself certainly doesn't know where it came from.

In practice, all Windows users should have an OEM copy of their OS of choice (MAC users don't have that option, and *nix users already do as a matter of course), but I do realize that that is a financial impossibility for the majority of the consumers in the market Aaron's and similar stores occupies.

I should note that there really isn't any "official" place to obtain a copy of the Windows OS without paying for it; you have to resort to torrents and similar shenanigans, which can be risky so far as malware/trojans/rootkits are concerned.

Another way to avoid this is to use a program such as Capsa 7 to pore through your network traffic. I did that a while back and found active connections from China when my scanner software didn't detect anything amiss. I was seeing constant traffic trickling upstream, never a huge or even notable amount, but constant. I plugged the hole by blocking the IP in my firewall and the behavior stopped. My guess, since Aaron's had photos in hand, is that the same method could be used to prevent the rental company from ever having anything to look at in the first place.

[JI7]

15. didn't the SCOTUS recently rule that Corps can decide whether there can be class action law suits ?

i hope Canada is much better with this and gets these scumbags.

[Blue_Tires]

16. Aaron's is distancing itself from the actions of outside vendors...

Aaron's, Inc....said today that a lawsuit filed by a Wyoming couple regarding a violation of privacy relating to a computer they rented from an Aaron's franchise store is without merit against Aaron's, Inc.

The Company believes that none of its over 1,140 Company-operated stores have used the product developed or provided by PC Rental Agent or Designerware LLC, the two vendors named in the lawsuit, and neither vendor is approved or have done any business with Aaron's, Inc.

Aaron's, Inc. respects its customers' privacy and has not authorized any of its corporate stores to install software that can activate a customer's webcam, capture screenshots, or track keystrokes. The named plaintiffs leased the computer at issue from an independently owned and operated franchisee. Aaron's, Inc. intends to vigorously defend itself against these allegations.

[woo me with science]

23. In a way, this is even more disturbing.

Lower Merion School District also used software provided by a vendor to spy on their students. I wonder how many vendors of these sorts of programs there are, and how many spy systems have been sold across the country and to whom. Surely Lower Merion School District and these Aaron franchises are not the only customers...

[Aerows]

18. The first thing I do

when I get a new laptop is wipe the drive and reinstall a fresh copy of Windows. On my main box, I don't have a webcam for reasons just like this. The last thing I need in life is to discover there is a sex tape of me floating around on the internet because a web cam was pointed at my bed LOL!

[Liberal_in_LA]

19. OMG

[myrna minx]

27. K&R n/t