Putting laptop in for mending - security

[LatinforTelly]

I need to have the screen of my laptop mended and wondered what the form is for making the content secure.

I had thought that I would just ask the shop to go through the second user's account which would not give them access to my photos and files, but they say that as part of the mending, they do a general MOT on how the computer runs, and would need my account access for this.

Whilst there are no state secrets(!) on my computer, it does have all my family photos, emails and other files on it, which I'm not too keen on some stranger looking at or copying.

I could just ask them to fix the screen, for which they'd only need the secondary access. I'm slightly wondering why they are encouraging me to give full access rather than just agreeing to fix the screen - is this just me being paranoid?

What do people generally do when they give a laptop in to be mended?

The only way to make sure they can't read your files is remove the disk.

If they need to run diagnostics on your laptop to figure out what is wrong they need administrator access. Your account is the administrator so they need access to your account. That's just the way it is, I'm afraid. The only way to stop them seeing things you don't want is to keep anything you regard as sensitive on a removable disk, USB stick or similar and remove it when taking the laptop for repair.

Any repairer who misused information from repair laptops would be in breach of GDPR and could face a fine, quite apart from the fact that no-one would want to use them so they would destroy their own business.