Copier + Hard Drive: A Dangerous Combination

It sounds like a slam dunk: Put a hard drive into a standard photocopier, so (depending on the copier's configuration) you can have a digital version of anything you run through the machine. That way, if the original is ever lost, you can always run back to the backup. (I hadn't realized this, but copiers have been including hard drives for five years now.)

But now people are finally waking up to the wrinkle in this plan, which should have been obvious: What do people use copiers for, anyway? Yes, for company flyers and employee manuals, but also for tax returns, insurance cards, photo IDs, and Social Security paperwork. Now what happens when that copier gets old and is sold on eBay? Gulp. Computerworld has more of the story.

Copiers are hardly highly-secure devices, and such data could be accessed via a network connection, too.

The wake-up call is, surprisingly, being delivered by Sharp, a manufacturer of these devices. The company polled Americans and found that 54 percent of those surveyed had no idea that photocopiers stored digital versions of everything put on the glass. Count me in the majority, I guess.

What to do? Naturally, Sharp (and presumably other companies too) are promoting its newer copiers, which encrypt digitally stored copies and "virtually shred" recent ones so they can't be recovered. If you've got such features on your office machine, make sure you use them. But also remember that next time you make copies at Kinko's or another copy shop, you could be leaving behind a copy of anything you reproduce. Behave accordingly.

LINK: Photocopiers: The newest ID theft threat