When I was a network administrator at a Divinity School on the east coast, my team had the opportunity to upgrade the hard drive of one of the deans before he went on sabbatical. We hooked one hard drive up to another with shared monitor and watched the porn fly by on a 10base-T slow ethernet connection. The dean didn't go on sabbatical because you don't get a sabbatical if you don't have a job. There was no chance the I.T. guys wouldn't see it.rnrn
People have become more savvy about deleting personal files from computers, especially before donating increasingly-obsolete hardware or just throwing it out, but a recent tudy by a couple of MIT graduate students reveals that a great deal of data that can identify and embarrass is left on discarded hard drives.rnrn
Simson Garfinkel and Abhi Shelat purchased 129 old hard drives over two years and found personal information on more than half of them, even on 51 machines that had been reformatted. An AP article in the Chicago Tribune details the one surefire method of erasing all your information from a machine.
