I beg to differ, its pretty trivial when you have admin access. Any admin account can sudo into any other account, and that would leave no trace, as long as you clear the history of that activity, or even simpler, the admin account can just rsync the entire disk/home dir to another device, in order to not have to worry about potentially leaving traces and having the full data for later analysis. Admin users can also change other users pw in the System Preferences, thus getting full access without even having to use the terminal, however, you would notice if they have changed your pwOne easy way to make it harder is simply creating a second admin account, with a different PW, so no tech can easily log in to your primary account. That would deny any snooping, and one could only access your data with some fairly serious work to change permissions. More than a snooper would do...only a serious hack/theft would attempt.
Probably not a likely risk factor when using Apple stores, but if you use a third-party repair shop, you have to take into account that they might not have the same ethical standards.
As long as you have a backup routine, wiping the disk before sending it to repair should be the obvious choice if you have any ambition for data privacy. The likelihood of a random repair shop dude even bothering to run data recovery on a device he is asked to repair is probably fairly low, but ok it could happen. If you're really want to be sure of blocking unintended access, just do the slower multi write reformat, then you have raised the bar for retrieving data from that disk to such a high degree, that the cost of attempting to access the unallocated data would be so high, that the dude in the repair shop wouldn't be able to access it even if he tried.
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