CHICAGO -- Members of a Chicago family are trying to get a warning out after they said a computer they bought as a child's gift turned out to be laden with pornography.
Rick and Joy Donaldson had something special planned this Christmas for their 13-year-old son, Simeon: a new computer.
"On Christmas Day we set it up, hit Internet Explorer and the first thing to pop up was a porn site," Rick Donaldson said. "That was a shocker."
Joy Donaldson said what appeared was child pornography. The Donaldsons said they had to yell for their son to stay out of the room.
Rick Donaldson said he purchased the computer from a Comp USA store in Skokie, Ill. It was a floor model Donaldson bought at a discount, but the father never imagined that such content would be on the computer. He said the URL that appeared wasn't just pornographic, but racist, too.
"It was very frustrating," Joy Donaldson said.
Comp USA said it is common practice for the store to erase hard drives. A store representative said this was "very rare and we're very apologetic."
Donaldson said he wanted to warn other families to be on the lookout.
"Our message to parents is that something like this can happen and make sure you're the fist one to look at it," he said.
This sounds like another pathetic lawsuit. I love that they had to use the racist card here. Compusa probably deserves a little slap here. Do they really think their tech's are doing a full erase. They are only formatting the drive - maybe. It would have been very easy for a greedy family to unerase a good portion of the drive. Unless the reporter got the statement wrong it says they yelled for their son to stay out of the room. Yeah, right on buzz. You are a thirteen years old and you just got a computer for christmas and thought you would just stay out of the room while your parents set up your computer - BULLSHIT!!!
Did Mrs Donaldson ever think that maybe Mr Donaldson created all of this content on the computer himself and then acted shocked when they opened the browser - Allegedly
I doubt it has anything to do with reusing hard drives - it looks to me like some teenage kid wandering around the store set the IE homepage to the sickest thing he could think of, expecting, at best, that some store employee demo-ing the machine would have a rather embarrassing moment (not that I've ever done anything like that.. *cough*.. and definitely not at the library). This is obviously WAY better. So here's to you, floor model homepage hi-jacker.