Resold hard drives on eBay, Craigslist are still ripe with leftover data

Before you throw away that old hard drive, make sure you purge the memory clean.  A new study has found that most users are accidentally giving up photos, Social Security numbers and financial data, by failing to properly delete the files on their recycled hard drives.

Blancco Technology Group, which specializes in data erasure, conducted the study by randomly buying 200 secondhand PC storage drives from eBay and Craigslist. The goal was to see if the company could recover any of the old data saved inside.

In most cases, it could. 78 percent of the drives contained residual data that could be recovered.

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