Digital Photocopiers Loaded With Secrets
Nearly every digital copier built since 2002 contains a hard drive that stores an image of every document copied, scanned, or emailed by the machine. If you're in the identity theft business it seems this would be a pot of gold.
This past February, CBS News went to a warehouse in New Jersey to see how hard it would be to buy a used copier loaded with documents. It turns out ... it's pretty easy.
The results were stunning: One of the copiers was from the Buffalo, N.Y., Police Sex Crimes Division and contained detailed domestic violence complaints and a list of wanted sex offenders. On a second machine from the Buffalo Police Narcotics Unit we found a list of targets in a major drug raid.
Another machine from Affinity Health Plan, a New York insurance company, contained 300 pages of individual medical records. They included everything from drug prescriptions, to blood test results, to a cancer diagnosis. A potentially serious breach of federal privacy law.
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Sometimes publicity can be a bad thing. Like when
your company is in the news because client records were found in city dumps or bought on
an auction website. If recycling companies are keeping their promises to sanitize hard
drives, why does data keep showing up on hard drives that were supposed to be sanitized
or destroyed?