by krossbow
That old copier still holds a picture of your backside
[Via Ars Technica]
The Federal Trade Commission wants to make sure the public knows an important truth: if you photocopy your butt on a modern copier, it’s probably still there, safe on the copier’s hard drive. It exists there along with medical forms, financial documents, and that list of gang members your police department was just about to arrest.
CBS News did a story last month on secrets kept by digital copiers. Most digital copiers produced in the last five years archive copied documents on internal hard drives, and those hard drives are easy enough to obtain once the copiers are resold or their lease expires. By examining the hard drives of several used copiers, CBS found “a list of targets in a major drug raid” from the Buffalo Police Narcotics Unit. It also scored Social Security numbers, medical documents, and “$40,000 in copied checks.”
[More]
Now, I know that the hard drives on these copiers is not very big and that it is used to spool very large jobs, etc. But do commercial coping companies have a policy for wiping the self serve copiers they have?
(Yes, I’m too lazy to look at their sites to dig that out.)
A Man With A Ph.D. 