When Computer Repair Laws Go Wild
Imagine taking your laptop or PC in for service and being informed that the Boca Raton computer repair shop you’ve relied on for a period of years can no longer do the work, according to the state of Florida.
The reason for this (entirely hypothetical) circumstance: because the owner doesn’t hold a state-issued private investigator’s license.
Continuing this theoretical encounter, imagine if you asked the Boca Raton computer repair company to perform the repairs anyway.
If you did so, you and the technician who performed the computer repair could both go to jail for a year and pay $14,000 in fines.
Right now, in Fort Lauderdale, the rest of Florida, and thankfully most of the U.S., this computer repair horror story is purely fiction.
But thousands of Texas computer repair shops and their customers now face this very real scenario due to a recent change in the law.
Under the Texas legislation - which was brought to the legislature on behalf of the private investigations industry - any computer repair shop must have a government-issued private investigator’s license if the analysis involves data that says something about the actions of a third party.
The law is so broad that it would include looking at who a child has been chatting with on the Internet, whether an employee has been using a computer to gamble online at work, or determining if a spouse unknowingly downloaded a virus onto a computer while visiting a disreputable site.
This is how cartels operate - under the veil of their "concern for public safety" they push for seemingly modest changes in the law - then push for aggressive and broad interpretations of said laws to push competitors out.
Fort Lauderdale computer repair is a profession performed by talented, tech-savvy entrepreneurs — without incident — every day.
Were such a law to be passed in Florida, Ft. Lauderdale computer repair shops might not be able to afford to get an investigator’s license because of the requirements - a criminal justice degree or three-year apprenticeship.
It would be patently unfair and the end of the industry as we know it. We can only hope that the Texas law is challenged and overturned, and that Ft. Lauderdale computer repair firms are never confronted with such problems.
