CNET.TECHNOLOGY wrote:
Yes, what if my drive was stolen and someone else would ask such services? It got me thinking!
Data recovery is one thing but actively making tools available on market is not fair. I think it breaches ethical vulnerability policies.
I agree law enforcement angle but not regular users, these drives are sold in colleges and explained to be safe to keep personal information of college kids safe. We all got free WD passports in 2018 and many of put all our life's and college work into the drive, WD deems their product is safe but bad actors cant actively sell tools this way.
My only ask is putting a process to verify the drive ownership, as a student of cyber law one can not build and sell exploits to a open market. I fully agree that only a police warrant / law officers must have such tools.
I only asked to fully understand how easy it was for someone to just sell such services.
To Einstein9 I appreciate that you only sell phone unlock software to law enforcement, please not that theft / loss of phones in public places are high and if some bad actor got access to these devices lives can be ruined. From personal experience my grandmother lost 30000$ since some one figured pattern lock was easy peasy to hack via brute force.
You still could argue the same about a simple undelete tool, assuming person A deliberately deleted data to get rid of it, person B can recover it using a simple undelete tool. You can now argue person B is wrong but also that person A is naïve. We agree person B is unethical at first glance as long as we know nothing else of the case (in which we can easily can come up with a story where Person A is the bad and person B is the good guy actually). But we can also ask if it is ethical to be that naïve?
You could also argue that with regards to easy peasy to hack locks, you should be complaining to the developer of the easy peasy to hack lock or even the person selecting the easy peasy to hack lock for security. In an ideal world we shouldn't need worrying about such things, but we live in a far from ideal world in which people steal other people's stuff or even countries.
With regards to limiting offering to law enforcement: It assumes law enforcement is 'the good guy' which is something I am not always so sure about.
Now what about encryption itself that is so good that even law enforcement can not break into it. Ethical or not?
You make this sound like an easy to answer, black and white question which it is not IMHO.
Anyway. Many of us get storage devices each day, we recover data from those without ever asking if the person sending in the device is the actual owner of the data.
