I knew that there could be some issues with my laptop after service it Apple, they informed me about it. But I thought to myself, come on, it's just a minor cooler issue, they won't even need to login to fix it. How could they possible break anything.
AFAIK they don't login to fix hardware issues -- they netboot diagnostics software but on multiple occasions I was informed by people that Apple had "made a backup of their system" before a reinstall. What that entails and what the retention policy is, I do not know but I suspect unless they're doing a three-pass erase on their temporary storage devices afterwards (which is unlikely) then your data is easy pickings...
My MBP, which is incidentally knackered, is still FileVault encrypted. It will stop a casual theif getting in but not much more
Am I missing something about the story here or is that an accurate summary?
You authorize Apple to make a backup of your drive if yu're having work done that may cause data loss.