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Lost Laptop Prompts $54 Million Lawsuit
D.C. Woman Sues Best Buy For Losing Computer She Sent In For Repairs.
In her lawsuit, 37-year-old Raelyn Campbell says she wants to draw attention to the consumer electronics retailer's consumer property and privacy-protection practices.

She tells The (Washington) Examiner she spent six months trying to get Best Buy to explain what happened to a computer that she took in for repairs.

here is how she going to loose this suit i think .

Best Buy spokeswoman Nissa French says Campbell has already received $1,110 for the laptop and a $500 gift.

full story here -- http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/02/ ... 0872.shtml

That story makes no sense. Piss poor reporting.

She never accepted that offer, nor the next one for $2500 according to this more complete story.

http://www.dailytech.com/Women+Sues+Bes ... e10665.htm

The woman's an idiot. She'll fail. They offered her what it's worth and that is that. So, they lost her laptop, Shi-at happens

At least that article explains WHY she wants more $$:

That's when Campbell discovered that her identity could be at risk due to private documents she stored on the computer. Shocked and infuriated with Best Buy's lack of helpfulness, she found a lawyer and filed a $54 million dollar lawsuit against Best Buy for losing her property and opening her to identity theft.

...but still, cancel cards and sign up with Life Lock (or one of those).

My store lost a laptop once. She came in to get it after leaving it there for 4 years. It was an old Thinkpad 600. She didn't even want it fixed 4 years ago. It had a broken screen and a bad hard drive. I'm sure we sold it or whatever. We offered to give her 2 Thinkpads to replace hers. But no , she wanted her's. She ended up taking us to court. After all was said and done, she had to pay us 200 dollars for storing it for four years.

I understand that she's trying to make a point. However, I doubt her identity is worth 54 million. Since Best Buy offered to replace the laptop, I don't think she has much of a case.

What will come of this, if it hasn't already, is computer repair stores having customers sign an agreement that will remove liability for personal data that is lost during the repair of the computer.

Err wrote:What will come of this, if it hasn't already, is computer repair stores having customers sign an agreement that will remove liability for personal data that is lost during the repair of the computer.

We have been doing that.. It's kind of stupid not to.. Especially if they bring in a PC w/Bad HD or something like that.. Or if we get people that bring in a PC and say "I want it wiped out and started fresh." We have them sign the waiver and make sure they know they will lose everything. They usually call a day or so after we've finished and say "Hey, my wife had some pictures on the computer she wants saved." and we say "Too late. We were done with it 3 hours after you signed the waiver." lol

This brings up a good point for me. I usually fix pc's for friends, and friends of friends, but I might start doing this also to cover my butt. The last thing I need is a lawsuit from an idiot that does not understand, "you will lose all your data".

I explain it pretty clearly but I also always backup whatever I can. If I'm replacing a bad drive I give them back the old drive and tell them to keep it as a data archive if it's still readable, or to destroy it - they're choice - but it's cheap insurance just to throw th old drive in a drawer.

Whenever I'm wiping a drive for an OS re-install I first backup everything the client will want on the new install (Docs, Favorites, Email, etc) then I also image the entire drive to a big 500Gb external USB drive I keep here just for that purpose and then I burn it to DVDs and give it to the client (image on the HDD get's security wiped when I'm done) so that if we missed anything I can recover it from the image later. DVD's are cheap so this is no big deal, and most people (not freaks like us) don't have much more than 20Gb on their drives.