What is the worst thing you've accidentally seen on a computer?

Not necessarily the typical content (child porn images/videos, disturbing internet searches) but rather also something that reveals a secret about someone.

Worst thing for me was probably helping a guy in this computer class connect his computer to a projector. Found out in some folders that was obsessed with gore and sex…Nothing to do with morals, it was just not pleasant to look at.

Probably not what what you are looking for, but one day in a meeting, my boss’s boss connected his laptop to a projector to start presenting something, but left it on the wrong screen for about 2 minutes. What the whole room got to stare at was a spreadsheet of the salaries of my boss and all his peers. :eek:

Depending on how you see it, that may be the best thing you’ve accidentally seen :smiley:

This probably doesn’t count, since it was not “accidental.”

For many years, I did computer forensics for civil clients (i.e., not criminal). I would often find all sorts of images stored on the HDD. In one particular case, I had a particularly graphic “spread beaver” image. My (very devout Christian) boss and I had the following conversation:

“You can’t print this image and put it in the report! It’s offensive and obscene. Our client will be offended.”

“But the client is paying us to locate and identify this material.”

“No!”

“OK. How about if I print a low-res version and set it off with red paper identifying it as ‘Offensive Material’ in the printed report?”

“Well…I guess that would be acceptable.”

[Client] “We love your report! Can you print this one picture as a full-color 36” x 24" for use during the hearing? We want to put it up on an easel during our testimony!"

I’ve seen just about everything, from lock-picking to child porn to manufacturing explosives.

Just out of curiosity, what part of connecting a computer to a projector involves snooping around in the the folders?

I didn’t actually see the computer, but a decade+ ago a coworker was complaining to me that his browser homepage had been hijacked to an obscure dictionary site. I recalled reading a Dope thread on the same topic, so came here to ask how to fix it for him.

Dopers told me how – and also that it was caused by visiting some rather extreme Russian-run porn sites without a good firewall program. So after passing along the fixit information, I got to have a rather awkward conversation with him explaining that he needed to firewall and secure up so his wife or kids wouldn’t stumble across the freaky porn sites he was visiting, and which he and I were not going to further discuss.

A jpg named “me up close”.

Not me, but a friend. His 30 something friend died in an accident and the computer illiterate widow asked my friend to go through the computer. Unfortunately, it looks like the deceased had been having an affair.

Everything I’ve seen, I’ve seen on purpose.

An employee was using Facebook Messenger at work on a shared desktop and neglected to logout.

The next day, someone else was using that computer and found messages that were about her, calling her a cunt, etc.

Meatspin.

Spoilered for NSFW.
Don’t google it.

A picture of my father’s penis.

Not exactly what the OP was looking for, but I took my personal (Seagate) external hard drive over to my sister’s house so I could copy a couple of financial files onto her computer. Their *family *computer, shared by her, hubby, and 3 kids.

Anyway, the *second *I plugged in the hard drive, it started copying EVERYTHING to my sister’s computer. Automatically. And you know how that goes, files and folders flash by a mile a minute with the little icons tumbling across the screen showing how they are being copied over.

Well, my hard drive had folders on it that a sister really doesn’t need to see from her brother, you know? Nothing illegal or sicko but certainly not what you want to download on a very evangelical family computer.

You can imagine how frantic I was to find the “cancel” prompt and then search for the destination folder and delete it. I never heard anything from her, so I guess I didn’t leave any remnants, but I about had a heart attack.

And how did you happen across this? :confused:

A not-very-active website I used to post on, which has since been shut down, lost its webmaster, and all kinds of disgusting porno images started popping up in the message boards. There’s a place and time for porno, and this wasn’t it, especially because a lot of the pictures appeared to depict underage teenagers getting it on, which was why they were disgusting. :eek:

He has frontotemporal dementia. One of the effects of FTD is loss of inhibition and a reduced ability to foresee the effects of one’s behavior. In dad’s case, he stopped pretending to be straight (mom had suspected for years that he’s not into women) and started trolling for hookups online. My mom was pretty sure he was looking at gay porn (nothing wrong with this, but it represented a significant departure from his usual behavior, and he was doing it in front of guests) and taking pictures of his genitals. She asked me to look at his browser history to confirm. I was expecting to find the porn sites (again, whatever turns turns you on). I was not expecting the link to the gay hookup site to point to his profile .

I had an office manager ask me to help her securely print some very sensitive information to a copier, in such a way that nobody could intercept it before she picked it up. It involved personnel issues and was very confidential. I helped her set up the print job so that the copier would hold the job until you manually typed a 4 digit PIN on the copier.

Unfortunately I couldn’t do this without seeing the material. It was a screenshot of a text message from one employee to another, begging her forgiveness for exposing himself to her in her cubicle. It was information I could never unknow from that point. :frowning:

As an IT person I frequently see information that I wish I didn’t and I try to stay professional and not let that info change my impression of people but it’s really difficult sometimes. I’m just glad I don’t directly support my agency’s HR department, that must be constantly awkward.

A human arm, split between the middle a ring fingers all the way up to the elbow.

Atamasama is right. As a career HR manager, I was privy to secrets about employees I truly wish I hadn’t been forced to know.

The worst case for me was an email from the VP Operations to a young lady on the evening housekeeping crew. Why an otherwise intelligent man would make such remarks through a company email I will never know, but in essence, the email was a thinly veiled threat to the housekeeper to meet him that night in the company gym for sexual relations or he would ‘have her job’.

One should alway double check one’s “To” line in an email before sending…

In law school, people bring their laptops into classes for note-taking or to surf the internet (one guy entered into online poker tournaments during lectures, and ended up doing so well over the semester that he dropped out of law school).

Well, during the first semester, there was a girl sitting in front of me, and she was working out of a folder full of pictures. We saw her open one, and it was a close-up of a woman’s genitals, and frankly, it almost looked like a smoker’s lung. After our shock, she opens another one, and this one looked like it was splayed out.

This process continued throughout the class, and we stared in shock, horror, and fascination, as each image was worse than the last.

We didn’t talk to her for a week, because we had no idea what to say. Finally, some of us were sitting around the quad, and it turns out that her mom was a fairly famous plastic surgeon, focusing on labiaplasty.

My friend helped run her mom’s website, and on that day, she had been working on before and after photos of the work her mom did, and my friend was focusing on all the “before” photos to make sure they were paired up accordingly, by file name.

Every now and then, I would talk friends into visiting the website, because some of those pictures are right on the front page, and seeing the looks on their faces once the page finished loading…

:eek:

So, what happened to this person? I certainly hope he was fired.