Copy machines store everything you copy.
 

I, for one, never knew this. How about them apples?

Digital Photocopiers Loaded With Secrets - CBS Evening News - CBS News

Welp, let's just say this makes me doubly glad that I have a scanner at home.

How long has it been like this? This is the first time I hear about it, but you'd think someone would have brought up the fact that it isn't really the greatest idea to have this kind of potential for information theft in just about every library and office building in the industrialized world.:confused:

Good info to know.

Now, time to ruin someone else's credit for a change.

j/k btw...

It's been like that ever since the first photocopiers you could use as printers were launched, i.e. when they became digital. Most office copiers double as faxes, scanners and printers and as such, have a small internal memory, usually storing the last 100 documents or so, although there's always an option to say how many it stores. Comes in handy when you pour coffee all over an important document and the copy you made.

I would have thought that anyone with really sensitive documents wouldn't be using a public copier and most people wouldn't copy anything with information on you couldn't get just by doing a few online searches or rooting through their bins. I doubt this "revalation" will lead to the collapse of Western civilization, although it does serve as a good heads up for those of you who didn't know I guess.

Well, the point of the article is that these machines are being used by organizations beyond our reach. If the local PD or your insurance company is tossing this stuff out without so much as a single degausser pass, then there's the potential for theft you can't control.

I mean, it's nice to know that someone's trying to educate the masses. But it's really hard for us private citizens to force a corporate employee into caring about our privacy. Especially if his job doesn't explicitly tell him to. =/

I am more interested in all the exciting butts you'd get a chance to see on one of those drives.

...stores everything? We must copy at least 300 pages a day at my work... would it really be storing all of that?

Kind of scary to know, as we copy a lot of time sheets (less valuable to a secondary source) and credit receipts (more valuable).

If Shin is right, though, with the sheer volume being copied it would mean the stuff that needs to be protected should cycle out for all of the access we copy for historical archives that wouldn't be good for a secondary source. Still, article is food for thought.

It seems to me that an astute manufacturer could garner good publicity and extra sales (especially to sectors like medical and law enforcement) by incorporating one or both of the following features into their machines:

• 'ghost' (a toggled option, like stapling - automatically erases the document from memory after the copy/print/scan is done by writing zeros to every block it had occupied);
• 'zero' (admin option which zeros the entire document-storage portion of the hard drive)

People use public photocopiers to make copies of their social security cards, passports, driver's licenses, and important banking information all the time. Our corporate policy doesn't allow us to photocopy things like checks or account numbers for clients, so you'd be amazed at how many people will use their local Kinko's to copy something like that.

I think that is pretty interesting. I really hope that no companies sold their copiers to other competing companies. Otherwise those corporate secrets are going to be leaked...as well as a couple of corporate moon shots of course.