Privacy

[#1]

A friend told me she rang her ISP about a fault she had with her inbox..The engineer she rang said there was nothing wrong
as he had sent her a test mail and could read it in her inbox..He also told her the what the photo was she used as her desktop..
Could this be true ?

[#2]

People can take control of your PC remotely, mostly to try and fix problems, but I would have thought an ISP would have a bit more common sense than to say things like that, or to spy on your computer. In the paper today it seems the latest craze is to take control of peoples web cams and spy on them, allthough this has been happening for years, I guess it fills a few columns in the papers.
I have allways advised my Niece to put a sock over her webcam or face it toward the wall. 

[#3]

Quote from: trufflesdad

A friend told me she rang her ISP about a fault she had with her inbox..The engineer she rang said there was nothing wrong as he had sent her a test mail and could read it in her inbox.

In this context was her inbox the one on the mail server rather than the local (POP3) folder on her PC? There's nothing unusual with the ISP agent being able to check whether the message arrived on their mail server.

Quote from: trufflesdad

He also told her the what the photo was she used as her desktop.

That's possible but normally needs remote assistance to be set up which usually requires the user to accept the connection attempt.

[#4]

It was her pop3 box and she was not asked about the connection attempt.
dick:quote

[#5]

Had she by any chance attached a screen capture of the error to a ticket?
With regard to remote access, our agents are able to use the GoToAssist software in order to view and control another user's PC but this depends on that user actually going to a specific link sent by the agent and putting in a code to accept the program's access, so I'd be very surprised indeed if that happened without the user being aware.