As far as having a "third party" handle your credit card stuff. Remember the dot-com bust a while back. Lots of stores and other places simple went away and all their machines ended up surplus. Amazing what information was being found on those machines. It is also a bit frightening to discover some of the "stuff" that ends up in temp folders. The thing to remember is that while you may not know which rock to look under for that info, there are lots of people out there that do know where to look for temp stuff. I once picked up a couple of old Dell GX-150 (pizza boxes) computers at Boeing surplus for use around the house as linux machines. They are all supposed to have the drives wiped and only boot to a DOS prompt. One of them booted up into windows 2k - no telling just what sort of proprietary info it had on it (our IT folks were NOT happy when I told them about it). I wiped it and installed Ubuntu Linux, but how many more managed to end up in the wrong hands (I saw people taking 15 or 20 of them at a time out of the surplus store).

As for the printers/fax machines with hard drives, they may be mostly RAM based now, but there are many documented cases of all sorts of information being obtained from surplus machines that had hard drives in them. Lots of them have the ability to buffer faxes and print documents for later printing and this sort of thing - there were indeed lots of them out there with hard drives and many of them ended up surplus and in the wrong hands.

When I worked in areas that were "classified", there were a whole bunch of hoops to jump through to get any type of storage media out of that area - failed hard drives got their platters dropped in acid baths etc.

mikey

This is what I referred to earlier as paranoia about your details. Firstly, the government and credit agencies already know all they need to know about you, and there is nothing you can do to stop them.

Secondly, so what if they get your credit card? As soon as you get your CC statement and see something on there that is not yours, you report it to the bank and they delete it immediately. Banks ALWAYS take your word for an illegal transaction over the person who charged it.

Most banks do this automatically, I sell quite a lot of product to customers in America, and very often their bank sees the transaction is outside the US and refuses to process it. They then have to contact their bank and authorise the transaction.

Geoff

Any printer intended for shared use in an organization that stores documents for later printing has a hard drive. The consumer inkjets you have don't do this, but large business printers all do. Unless the customer orders it without the drive and then they lose all of the stored document capability.

Within a 30 meter radius of where I'm sitting now are 4 new printers all with hard drives.

I spent 12 years designing business printers. We offered a secure wipe option to customers for $500 but few bought it. Used printers are snapped up at auction by identity thieves. It's easy pickings.

rocky