How do I contact an Apple Inc. CEO?

Wipe the drive and reinstall your OS X.

Pete

Apple is not a detective or police agency. While you could report it to them, Apple can't do anything about it. Best Buy should wiped the drive when it was returned and restored it to factory settings.

As petermac87 noted, that's what you should now do. Back up ONLY your personal files to another drive. Erase the drive and reinstall the OS. Reinstall your third party apps from their orginial disks or purchased downloads. Restore ONLY your personal data.

Depends how much data you have. You can get 1TB backup drives these days for about sixty bucks. Not much of a layout to protect your vital data.

Pete

Even if you did not have this particular problem, you should always have an external drive for backups - all hard drives fail eventually, so you do want your files backed up before that happens. It's a necessity and you will be grateful to have it when/if a problem occurs.

As for the previous owner, either forward the information to the police or simply forget about it; however, erasing and reinstalling should be first on your list of things to do.

If you want to contact Apple, click on the link at the bottom of the page "contact us" - the corporate HQ address is there. You can search/google for a VP if you want a particular person - I've always found whomever I needed to contact that way.

Your beef should be with Best Buys who failed to reinstall a fresh copy of the OS X. You now need to do that yourself. Backup and then bouts holding down Command and R keys and reinstall a fresh copy. All previous data and settings will be gone.

Pete

Have you tried Best Buys? Only Joking!!!!!

You may need to shop around, but $80 is pretty good. As long as it is at least twice the size of your internal drive.

Pete

Remember you get what you pay for. A cheap drive in a cheaply made enclosure will most likely not last very long. What brand/model is the drive you're referring to?

Are you actually experiencing any issues or problems with your computer?

You've been using this computer since 2007, why the concern now?

You could find a book's worth of data on this person and Apple still won't, and can't do anything with it. They would just direct you to a police station.

Not having a way to backup your data is a sure way to lose it, no matter what type of computer or OS you're talking about. All drives eventually die, and that includes SSDs. Without a backup, your photos and everything else will be history. As far as your apps? You do legally own every third party app you're using, yes? In which case, you should also have the means to reinstall them.

But getting back to the main issue. After reading your initial post again, I don't see how anything nefarious could be going on. The first owner and Best Buy were simply negligent in getting rid of old data. That you can find old documents that belonged to the first owner is no proof of any kind of intrusion of illegal activity. They're just old files to delete.

I bought a used 2010 Mac Mini from a reseller of used equipment online. Very high ranking dealer. And in all fairness, I got what I ordered, though it was missing the pictured original gray disks and external video converter. They were very good and quick about reimbursing me for what the missing items would cost to purchase from Apple.

Here's the thing on that Mini, through. The original owner had left tons of personal data on the drive. Family pictures, tax returns with supporting digital receipts, and other stuff no one should ever get their hands on. He probably expected the reseller would wipe the drive before putting it up for sale, but didn't. And the original owner was crazy for bringing it in with all of that data on the drive in the first place. Luckily for the that previous owner, I'm not the kind of person who would take advantage of that treasure trove of personal info. I could have made his life miserable and practically taken over his online identity with the info I had at my disposal. Instead, I booted to a retail Snow Leopard disk and wiped the drive.

Anyway, I don't see anything other than the usual funny mix of files belonging to the original admin account, and now yours. If you want to be certain everything related to the first owner is gone, erase the drive and reinstall everything from scratch. You do of course need to make a backup of your personal data, first.

Your issue is with Best Buy, not Apple. Take it up with them, or the police, or both.