Porn leader, but who's the snoop?

I'm the leader, I'm the leader, I'm the leader of the gang, I am.

Thus sang the man wearing the Bacofoil jacket and a Brillo pad on his head. For a long time, I thought Gary Glitter was just another Dr Who monster. Another in a long line of irritating monsters - not frightening, not scary, just irritating. Those cybermen irritated me most. Why is it that despite walking very slowly they could always catch people who were running away? And I'll tell you another thing, we never saw the cybermen in the rain did we? No, one quick shower and your average cyberman is in bed for a week with a can of WD40 and anti-rust paste.

Anyway, Gary Glitter. No doubt you have heard about the little spot of bother that our Gary has got into. He took a PC to PC World in Bristol to be repaired and they allegedly found pornographic material on its hard disk. Ouch.

Frankly, I don't really care about Gary Glitter. I disapprove of child pornography and people who deal in it, but Gary Glitter was never one of the acts of the 70s that particularly engaged me - I preferred Led Zeppelin. So I am not bothered by the affair, except to hope that at the end of it all he promises never to perform I Love You Love again.

No, the thing that worries me most about this is the staff at PC World.

Let's think about this. There you are. You have been given a PC to fix and you fix it. You switch it on and it works. Hurrah, you say to yourself, and reach behind to pat yourself on the back. You look at your watch and it is five minutes until your tea break. So you look back at the PC you have just fixed and think, 'hmmm', and you start nosing around the hard disk.

So, now you are breaking and entering someone's computer.

Let's not forget you have to click or type commands to progress from there - you are actively being nosy. And if there was any porn on Mr Glitter's PC this is highly likely to be what happened - unless, say, he had put a pornographic picture as his Windows wallpaper.

But is this right? Say I have a letter on my PC to the Dr Who fan club and someone else finds out about it and tells the world, thus making me a laughing stock. Can I sue?

Let me repeat, child porn is BAD and should be stopped. But if I want to have my PC serviced, do I have to wipe the hard disk of everything that might be unsavoury, embarrassing or illegal before I send it in?

And more importantly, if I get pissed off with the people who exposed me as someone who likes Dr Who, can I sue them dead?

While stopping child pornography is good, surely respecting people's privacy is just as important. Whatever the outcome in this case, you had better think twice before you start poking around someone else's hard disk. Indeed, think twice about getting someone else to service your computer.

Chris Long is a freelance journalist.