I wrote that right after I read a CBS News article titled, “Digital Photocopiers Loaded With Secrets.” It leads off with this gem:
Nearly every digital copier built since 2002 contains a hard drive – like the one on your personal computer – storing an image of every document copied, scanned, or emailed by the machine.
Oh goodness. Seems that a lot of digital copiers now have hard drives in them — and those hard drives have images on them from your copies.
While the article is a bit alarmist, it certainly is food for thought. Especially when you consider how many “high end” copiers are leased each year and then returned when the lease is up. Those fancy copiers probably have a much better chance of storing data on internal hard drives.
We have a copier at work that I can not wait to replace, but now I know one last step I’ll take before I get rid of it: Pull the drive and scrub it!
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I wonder what happens with that information. You think it’s for sale? You think there’s a company that buys old-new copiers for “recycling” who then harvests all that information? I doubt it would even be illegal to do so. Then they could sell it to whomever wanted it I guess… Maybe that’s the next big business… ever wanted to start your own shady business?
Wonder how long it’d take to copy an HD if you went to an office posing as a repair person and cabled up and copied… probably just faster to swap out HD’s. Wonder what their format is? OK. Inquiring minds want to know… when you busting open your copier at work to share the skinny with us?
You can’t even guess how much I want to bust open the work copier just to check this out!
Seems like quite the shady little enterprise though, doesn’t it?