Wait a minute

"This is like your neighbour breaking into your house and going through your stuff"

Sorry, but no. The guy didn't break into a house, he was brought a PC for repair. That's like bringing your car to the garage, then complaining that the mechanic took a look at the trunk, in which you happened to have stored a load of skin mags.

Privacy is in your own home, that is where you can expect to have it. Anywhere else and you must expect that some things will be discovered by the less delicate of our fellow man. And the sheer comic value of some people's pic folders is too tempting to not dig in to - especially since there is no way, short of having a PC specifically rigged for it, to discover what has been copied. And even that would not work if the tech took out the disk to slave it to a dedicated repair machine.

I am knowledgeable enough in PCs to be able to repair and maintain my own - so I have never had to bring my PC to a repair store. Had that happened, the data disk would most certainly have been taken out of the casing, so as to remove any chance of discovery of my bank account details, financial spreadsheets and, as an afterthought, my vast collection of Garfield and other toons.

An ounce of prevention . . .