Big Brother is Watching... little brother, too.

[Balladeer]

 

This item was brought to my attention in my class and I was one of the 60% who did not know that industrial copy machines save a copy of every document you scan to a hard drive. (And that many companies do not erase said hard drive before selling old machines.) I found it disturbing in the least and wanted to make sure the well-informed spiderweb community was also informed about this. If this is old-news that was already beaten around the bush while I was inactive, don't mind me. Otherwise...

 

Discuss.

 

 

My class post on the matter:

 

"Goodness... Why is it even necessary for the copiers to hold this information on their hard drives? Wouldn't it be sufficient for the machine to hold the document in RAM while printing or faxing and then deleting it as soon as the job was processed? I see this as an unnecessary addition on the part of the manufacturers, and grievously so. It's not even a matter of making sure you don't use a copier for sensitive documents, it's all the sensitive documents that other companies have about you and are copying, too. There's almost nothing you can do about it besides asking the company about their copier policies and requesting they change them if they are not deleting this information."

[keira]

The original purpose that they were marketing was that it was to save commonly-copied documents for later use.

 

see also

Edited November 3, 2012 by Sylae
yet another reason for the paperless office, at least with email the tracking is obvious

[Student of Trinity]

I find paper documents a ridiculous anachronism. If you like having a non-volatile medium for your information, maybe you should consider clay tablets. They last really well.

 

I try to keep all my information in electronic form, where it takes up no space, is easily editable, and above all is searchable. Everything I have is automatically backed up at least once, and all the important stuff is backed up four or five times, to two or three different sites.

[Randomizer]

Which works fine as long as you keep a back up device to read the format.

 

Goes off to find a magnetic tape reader for 12 inch reel.

 

"Do you want to live in a world with no USB ports? - Sheldon Cooper The Big Bang Theory

[Student of Trinity]

I suppose I can see the concern about losing readability for massive corporate data dumps, that have literally been dumped somewhere for decades. But for individuals I just don't see the problem. I have no trouble reading the hard drive on the nearly thirteen-year-old 'desklamp' iMac that has now been relegated to our youngest daughter, over our wireless network, with a laptop running the latest OS.

 

If you live in a rich country, and you're worrying about your data, you can afford to get some kind of new computer at least every ten years. It'll still be compatible. Copy all the old stuff over.

[Mosquito---Slayer]

Paper documents are less of a strain on the eyes, and they are probably more comfortable as well, It's still desirable to have an e-copy of everything but paper documents aren't totally pointless either, I store everything I need in e-form but given a choice I prefer the paper versions.

And clay tablets are too heavy, plus they take a lot of space .

[BMA]

I prefer paper, but only because I've found computers to be too unreliable. Many a time I've lost an important e-document because my PC got unstable and I had to reinstall my OS.

[Actaeon]

There are many things I am in favor of keeping tangible and low-fi, but I couldn't care less about the sort of things that usually end up on copiers. I also roll my eyes every time someone takes fifteen minutes to send a fax they could have scanned and emailed in five.

 

It's very strange to live in a world where information is power, but the average person refuses to accept. I'm among that group- there are about a dozen Spiderwebbers with access to my real name, hometown, phone number... all thanks to the magic of Facebook. Really, though, you'd think it would be cheaper to save it in RAM or build in a couple hundred megabytes of solid state memory for the big jobs. Then you could advertise as the data-safe alternative and probably get a leg up on your competitors.

 

Unless, of course, they're harvesting all this info and beaming it back to headquarters for their eventual world takeover.

[Harehunter]

I remember there was a time that is was predicted that with the advent of personal computers, that we would become a paperless society. In fact, we use many times the amount of paper now than we did back then. One person, when asked about this, said that in the '60s and '70s, paper was a storage medium. Now it is used as interface. We print it, use it, and throw it away for an updated version. The main reason for printed output was the volume of information you could put on paper vs what you could see on a 80x24 character CRT. Now we have word processors, browsers and large high resolution screens which can present a whole printed page at a time. The drawback then was portability; only desktop machines had a screen big enough to easily read those PDF documents. The new generation of notebook computers, IPads, etc will alleviate that problem, but now many desktop machines are sporting dual displays.

 

Besides, nothing is more relaxing, at least to me, than getting away from that electronic gadget, unplugging and sitting on the back deck reading a book while having a dog in my lap. But I'm sort of old-fashioned that way.

[The Mystic]

I prefer paper, but only because I've found computers to be too unreliable. Many a time I've lost an important e-document because my PC got unstable and I had to reinstall my OS.

Been there, done that. There was even one OS reinstall where I managed to have a complete backup readily available, only to discover that everything in the backup had been reverted back to May of the previous year.

 

As far as paper is concerned, I'll take the hardcopy over the electronic version any day. I hear a lot of talk every so often about how we're supposed to be becoming a "paperless society," but I don't really believe it. Every time I hear some (usually self- proclaimed) "expert" declare the world to be officially paperless by a specific date (never the same twice), someone else turns a cubic mile of lumber into billions of 20-page pamphlets touting the evils of deforestation.

Besides, nothing is more relaxing, at least to me, than getting away from that electronic gadget, unplugging and sitting on the back deck reading a book while having a dog in my lap. But I'm sort of old-fashioned that way.

This. Minus the dog, though; I don't have any kind of pet. I do, however, usually have a cold drink nearby, and sometimes an LP playing.

[The Almighty Doer of Stuff]

In my day, sonny, we didn't have newfangled eye pads to read from! We had bound pads of paper, with words written in them in ACTUAL INK! We didn't have those fancy-smancy seedies neither, no sir! We listened to pieces of plastic with grooves cut in'em, which we scratched with a needle to make sound! And forget about hot drinks! In my day, all drinks were cold, 'cause we hadn't invented fire yet! You rotten, spoiled kids! Get off my lawn!

[Goldengirl]

I remember there was a time that is was predicted that with the advent of personal computers, that we would become a paperless society. In fact, we use many times the amount of paper now than we did back then.

 

Does this trend hold when looking at per capita amounts of paper? The population has gone up quite a bit since the 60's and 70's, too, y'know.

[Mosquito---Slayer]

A newspaper report said that the per capita usage almost doubled in Canada from 83-03, that could very well be true for the whole world in general considering that the newly industrializing countries would have probably grown even faster.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/story/2006/11/10/tech-paperless.html

[The Loquacious Lord Grimm]

I'm trying to remember which corporation I encountered that cited this topic very specifically as motivation not to do anything crude with the copy machines. Regardless of where, I remember that for the most part, it worked, but that one staff members had mentioned to me that the possibility of having one's posterior... or worse... indelibly stored on company hardware was actually motivation for several applicants.

It might have been my university's library, now that I think about it.

---

When consulted specifically for this post, The Silent Assassin only indicated that Stephanie Meyer is to blame.

No, I don't know what that's supposed to mean, either.

[Rowen]

This thread has made me remember this.

[Balladeer]

Huh, I thought there would be more concern about sensitive information being made available to anyone who knew where to look for it on a used machine. Especially with the rise in identity theft already.

[The Loquacious Lord Grimm]

Huh, I thought there would be more concern about sensitive information being made available to anyone who knew where to look for it on a used machine. Especially with the rise in identity theft already.

 

We're already using stolen identities, silly.

 

 

Edit: I don't want it to sound like identity theft isn't a serious thing, so I'll just add that the easiest way to prevent identity theft is to keep your passwords to yourself, keep your Internet access encrypted, and keep a regular eye on your bank accounts and credit report. There is very little that a would-be thief can't find out about you with some serious digging, thanks to the accessibility of information that the Internet and... a telephone.... brings, but most thieves can't or won't justify taking that amount of time, and are satisfied by the illicit gains that can be made by casually snagging people who leave themselves exposed.

 

---

The Silent Assassin has been known to create fake identities for the sole purpose of leaving them for would-be thieves to find.

He then hunts them down and feeds them last month's leftovers.