Study Finds 1 in 10 Used Hard Drives Contains Old Personal Data

Lucas123 writes "A newly published study by Britain's data protection regulatory agency found that more than one in 10 second-hand hard drives being sold online contain recoverable personal information from the original owner. "Many people will presume that pressing the delete button on a computer file means that it is gone forever. However this information can easily be recovered," Britain's Information Commissioner, Christopher Graham, said in a statement. In all, the research found 34,000 files containing personal or corporate information were recovered from the devices. Along with the study, a survey revealed that 65% of people hand down their old PC, laptop and cell phones to others. One in ten of those people who disposed of their old devices, left all their data on them. The British government also offered new guidelines for ensuring devices are properly wiped of data."

Anecdote

[PPH]

A few years back, I happened to visit my dentist's office just after he had all of his workstations upgraded. By the medical/dental s/w maintenance vendor's technician. While the tech was standing there, I asked my dentist what he was going to do with all his old PC's. Donate them to a local school, he said. I asked if there was any patient data on them. He told me that the vendor's tech had reformatted the hard drives, so that wouldn't be a problem. I asked him (within earshot of that tech) if he had ever heard of the 'unformat' command. I then suggested that he have the vendor investigate DBAN [dban.org] before letting these machines off the property.

I don't know who is responsible for the loss of patent data under HIPAA [wikipedia.org] regulations. But I'd hope that vendors specializing in medical IT support would.

Only?

[Internetuser1248]

Every 2nd hand hard disk I have ever acquired has had personal data on it. None of the previous owners had even attempted to delete the data all the filesystem pointers were intact. On the other hand none of them ever had any useful data on them, unless I wanted to embarrass the previous owner by sending their porn collection to their wife/parents.

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