Hm. My iMac is being fixed, and the repair person rang and asked for my password so he could fix it. Should he actually need that? Can’t they boot off a CD or something and not need access to my personal files? Oh well.

Searching I can’t find a thing either way, so who knows. I don’t think I’ve given my password to anyone before, though. Hm.

10 thoughts on “should the repairers need my password?

  1. Geoff Cain

    Anything that will make any kind of alteration to the operating system files would require a root password. I just upgraded the OS on a laptop and it required the admin password. Any repair that would involve defragmenting the hard drive would require a pw too.

  2. dr. b.

    I’ve had my Powerbook repaired 3 times and they did need my password each time. I don’t know if they need to unlock encrypted files in order to have full access (which was the case when I had hard drive issues) or if they do a just in case back up, but they did need it.

  3. Michael Faris

    I think they need access to an admin in order to test hardware and such. When I set mine in, they set up an “Apple” account without a password so that they didn’t have to get into my admin and couldn’t access my personal files.

    For the future, I’d suggest having an second account on your Mac so that they can access that without getting into your stuff.

  4. Jill

    Well, good to know that it’s standard procedure, I guess. And yes, Michael, I’ll probably do that – but wouldn’t it have to have admin privileges? And thereby that sorto f invalidates the aim?

  5. torill

    When I send machines off for repairs, I change my password to something I don’t mind sharing. And I have gotten into a habit of not keeping things on the computer that I don’t mind too much to share.

  6. Jill

    Sensible, Torill.

  7. JoseAngel

    Since half our brain and half our soul is in the computer nowadays, the repairperson is the new version of the psychoanalyst and the confessor. So…

  8. Jill

    Or perhaps the repairperson will start blogging instead of me? Maybe I *am* the repairperson simply pretending to be jill/txt…

  9. Sindre

    The repair person should not require a password to diagnose a laptop (or any other computer)
    Even so, it is less time consuming if a username and password is provided.

    It can be booted from an external harddrive without much difficulty. I used my iPod more than once as a boot disk for my Powerbook when testing out Linux on my mac, worked like a charm.

    Even for backups there is no need to actually know the password used to access the data, it is suffcient to replicate the disks content without access to the content. Basically just doing a carbon copy of the 0’s and 1’s on the disk.

    I always get a bit suspicious when asked to hand over my password, this is a good reminder that on a mac you should atleast have a seperate password for your keychain and login.

  10. Jill

    Yes. I think that’s what I really learnt from this…

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