I find this worrying.

[hazelnut]

When you watch this video and see the amount of documents that are lifted off hard drives from old copy machines, you might find this as scary as I do.

 

How many times have you had to take your passport, proof of address, wages info etc which are then photo copied by the organisation which asked you to provide them.

 

We just hand over our confidential info to a photo copier without a second thought.

 

[Tasgandy]

When you watch this video and see the amount of documents that are lifted off hard drives from old copy machines, you might find this as scary as I do.

 

How many times have you had to take your passport, proof of address, wages info etc which are then photo copied by the organisation which asked you to provide them.

 

We just hand over our confidential info to a photo copier without a second thought.

 

Hazelnut as one who has spent some 20 years (3 years ago) in this industry with Canon & Oc? you are correct, we should all be worried about residual information not erased from MFD's (multifunction devices) i.e. the digital photocopier that has been a copier / network printer / network fax / network scanner (scan to e-mail, fax, PDF etc.) for the last 10 + years. As a member of technical support within these industries responsible for technical pre & post sales support, installations, training and disposal many client's simply do not follow documented advice from the manufacturers. All data should be erased from the MFD prior to disposal. Should the MDF be traded in on new equipment the companies I worked for always erased data on traded MFD's on arrival. Where the client decided not to trade in the MFD and sold them on the open market, 90% of these MDF's were sold with hard drives full of data for anyone to access. As Sharp said in the video "if you don't take control of your data someone else will". Remember these MFD's can be purchased with data erasure software. Many Government Departments will remove & destroy the internal hard drives prior to disposal similar to their PC disposal procedure.

 

With the above in mind, my own MFD (Canon MF4150) does not have an internal hard drive, everything is held in RAM and flushed on power down. The down side is that my MFD is a little slower and does not contain as many "bells & whistles" as the big end of town.

[login123]

Well, thank you for sharing that. No wisecracks from me this time. That is worrisome. That looked like a regular IDE hard drive, didn't it? Ugh.

[Tasgandy]

Well, thank you for sharing that. No wisecracks from me this time. That is worrisome. That looked like a regular IDE hard drive, didn't it? Ugh.

Yes Squire a normal full size hard drive and several years ago they (we) were using 20 & 40GIG laptop HD's.

[ishan_rulz]

That is disturbing!

[kroozer]

We just hand over our confidential info to a photo copier without a second thought.

Yes hazel I found out about this two years ago and don't use public copiers anymore for sensitive stuff but I have no control over what others do with my documents. We are powerless in controlling this.