Your photocopier remembers what you copy/scan/fax-be aware

[Hugh R]

Email from corporate today. Most copiers/fax/scanners have a hard drive. When you sell it, or return on lease, they can see copies of every document that went through the device. Your tax returns, everything. If you print 1,000 flyers for your yard sale on the company machine, they can find it. Our company policy is now to delete the memory of all of these machines before they get returned on lease. Apparently this applies to home machines as well.


You have been warned.

[futuresoptions]

Gulp!

[legion]

Good thing I always go "Office Space" on mine.

[A930Rocket]

And how is it done?

I'm still trying to figure out if my iPhone has a recyle bin....

[James Brown]

The iphone does, it's in itunes.

[stomachmonkey]

Originally Posted by Hugh R

...they can see copies of every document that went through the device....


You have been warned.

Yes and no. Memory/disc space is finite. At some point the device will need to purge/delete or overwrite existing data.

So on a heavily used machine it will get flushed faster.

I am not aware of common consumer level devices that have internal hardrives or large data caches that would concern me.

[Hugh R]

CBS did a piece on this on some NY police department and downloaded 100,000 pages in a HD on a copier.

[Scuba Steve]

On an average copier hard drive, wonder how many times it indicates someone scanned their butt.

[rnln]

and for sure hitting reset button won't wipe the memmory. How to wipe it?

[Porsche-O-Phile]

I'm sure the capacity of modern hard drives FAR exceeds the required storage capacity for all the images that will be scanned in their lifetimes, so just hoping that stuff will be overwritten is foolish.

I've known about this for a long time and brought it up to our supposed "IT guru". Bonehead didn't even know about it and claimed "I'll look into it", which of course means he'd round file it. I never copy or scan ANYTHING on a company copier that has anything personally identifiable on it except business-related signed documents that might have my signature. I suggest you all do the same.

This can be a real problem in personnel/H.R. offices particularly because people are scanning SS cards, driver licenses, etc. You've been warned.

The only way to ensure data is off a hard drive permanently is to physically destroy the drive. Aside from that, magnetic wiping or repartition & reformat several times is suitable and will protect against data recovery by someone not either working for or who should be working for the NSA.

[island_dude]

Originally Posted by Porsche-O-Phile

The only way to ensure data is off a hard drive permanently is to physically destroy the drive. Aside from that, magnetic wiping or repartition & reformat several times is suitable and will protect against data recovery by someone not either working for or who should be working for the NSA.

Physically destroying the drive, ideally by sanding off the coating of the platters is best. Reformating and repartitioning does nothing at all unless it is a low level overwrite. Typically you have to overwrite with alternating bit patterns to do the job several times. We had a E-recycle day in the community on earth day. They brought in a HD "sanitizer" for people to destroy their drives. It runs a powerful magnet over the drive and then drives a spike through the platters and case of the drive. After that, they said they would recycle the scrap. I doubt the magnet would do much, but anyone wanting to access the data would really have to really want it to bother trying to recover it.

[Dave L]

sounds like a good test for the "will it Blend?" guy

[scottmandue]

Originally Posted by Scuba Steve

On an average copier hard drive, wonder how many times it indicates someone scanned their butt.

Or other body parts

[aap1966]

"Your photocopier remembers what you copy/scan/fax-be aware"


It must be bored out of it's brain......

[peppy]

I don't own a copy machine, I use one at the office supply store

personal tax returns
medical records
corp. tax returns

I wonder what they are going to do with the HD

[A930Rocket]

Sell to the highest bidder....

Originally Posted by peppy

I don't own a copy machine, I use one at the office supply store

personal tax returns
medical records
corp. tax returns

I wonder what they are going to do with the HD

[Jesset100]

Yes sir, most of the copiers, fax, and printers go overseas with all that info on the hard drives

[myamoto1]

The question I have is why does a copier have a HD that'll store every document ever scanned?

[Porsche-O-Phile]

Cheaper than volitile memory for large documents.

[myamoto1]

I would think (this is what usually gets me in trouble) that most printers would not need to have the entire document in its memory in order to print it. My expectation is that a smaller volitile memory would work by storing the first 5 - 10 pages, then overwriting that data as pages are printed and additional pages are "recieved".

Heck, we can stream videos, why can't a copier stream print queues?