Your Data & Privacy During Repairs

Customer Information We Collect

Computer Clinic keeps the personal information required for a normal repair booking deliberately limited. For our standard job sheets and bookings, we normally record your name and telephone number so that we can identify your repair, contact you regarding the work and maintain the relevant job and warranty record.

Those details are held for legitimate business purposes connected with your repair, namely creating and maintaining your job sheet, identifying you and your device, contacting you about diagnosis, quotations and repair authorisation, telling you when the device is ready, managing repair and warranty history, managing bookings, and dealing with any later questions or complaints about the work.

We do not routinely ask for your home address, date of birth or other personal information for a normal repair booking. If you choose to give us an email address, or you contact us through the website, that is handled separately, and our Privacy Policy sets out what the website itself processes.

Information On Your Device

This is different from the information we collect from you. Computers, laptops and phones left for repair may themselves contain personal files, photos, messages, accounts and documents. That information belongs to you, and it is not something we collect for our records.

Devices are handled by our technicians, kept securely on our premises and returned to you with your data intact wherever that is possible.

Access to Your Device

To diagnose, repair and test a device, a technician may sometimes need to access the operating system or the relevant parts of the device far enough to reproduce and confirm the reported fault. That access is limited to what is reasonably necessary for the work you have asked us to do.

Computer Clinic does not intentionally access personal files that are unrelated to the repair.

Passwords and Passcodes

A device password or passcode is not part of the normal customer information we record for a job sheet. Where a password or passcode is genuinely required to start, diagnose, repair or test that particular machine, we will ask you for it specifically for that repair and use it only for that purpose.

If you would prefer not to share it, tell us, and we will explain what we can and cannot test without it.

Personal Files

Our technicians do not go looking through personal files that have nothing to do with the repair. Where you have specifically asked for a service such as data recovery, data transfer, malware removal, operating-system repair, or a storage-drive replacement or clone, files may need to be opened or handled to carry that service out. In those cases access is limited to what is reasonably necessary to perform the service you requested, for example checking that documents and photos have copied across correctly.

Backups

Please keep a current backup before a repair wherever that is reasonably possible. Storage devices can fail without warning, sometimes during the very diagnosis that reveals the fault, so a backup is the single best protection for your data.

We take reasonable care, but we cannot guarantee that data can never be lost.

Data Recovery

Successful data recovery cannot be guaranteed. What can be retrieved depends on the condition of the drive, the type of failure and what has happened to it since. We will tell you honestly what we think the chances are.

Data Transfers

Where you ask us to transfer, clone or recover data, we may need to copy your data onto another storage device or onto temporary working storage in order to complete the job.

Temporary Copies

Where a temporary copy is needed to carry out a service, it is kept only for as long as is reasonably necessary for that service and for legitimate business requirements, and is then removed.

Confidentiality

Customer data is not intentionally accessed, copied or disclosed for any purpose unrelated to the service you have requested, except where we are legally required to do so.

Privacy Policy

For how we handle personal data more generally, including contact details, repair records and website data, see our Privacy Policy.