Of course you did. You're not handing your device over to Best Buy, you're handing it over to Jimmy on the Geek Squad who is quiet and a bit weird. And he loves to snoop into other people's phones. Not for identity theft or reselling naughty pictures, but simply for the fun of snooping on other people.
Backup your device and wipe all of your data before handing a phone over to anyone else. It's just safer that way.
I had the entire 4 man crew go on and on about how LaCie La Porsche hard dive enclosures (they were HDDs) were not accessible. They claimed every single one they took apart, was DOA. I was like um neat.
Went home. Pried it apart. Salvaged the completely stock Seagate HDD and tossed the shitty enclosure.
Doesn’t matter if it’s Jimmy who is quiet and weird. I worked at a Verizon store. Brayden the kind, tall, outgoing handsome guy with a nice smile is worse. He would ask girls, moms, grandmas even to to unlock their phone and then immediately take them in the back to search for nudes. As you said, back up your phone and wipe it before it’s ever in anyone else’s hands.
Absolutely not surprised. I've had multiple friends that worked Geek Squad. All of them have admitted to snooping at least once and most have said their coworkers did it constantly.
Don't take your computer to Geek Squad, folks. They're all untrained highschoolers following a script anyways
FBI offers a bounty to technicians who report incriminating evidence, so yeah, when you take your repair tickes to a large service, you can expect this.
Local services depend on word of mouth so they might be more respectful, but only because they are incentivized to not let rumors of their snooping get out.
Still, surveillance staff routinely pass saucy and gross pics all over their office and we only hope they don't dump them on the internet like high-school students