It just marks the space they occupy as being available when and if needed. Until that time, all those "deleted" files remain on your computer, waiting for anyone with a file "undelete" program to gain complete access to them.

And there are hundreds of file "undelete" programs that anyone can download and install in seconds. And believe it or not, many of these fully-functioning utilities are free.

Scary isn't it. Now anyone who has access to your PC when you're not around can pop up a window and list every one of your intact deleted files and then recover whatever they want. And that's using a free utility. Imagine what professional forensic techs like those that work for security auditing firms, business competitors, law enforcement and the IRS can do with their professional equipment costing thousands of dollars.

Here's a blurb from a study done by students at MIT (The Massachusetts Institute of Technology) :

"Scavenging through the data inadvertently left on 158 used disk drives, the students at MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science found more than 5,000 credit card numbers, detailed personal and corporate financial records, numerous medical records, and gigabytes of personal email with passwords and logons."

"Roughly 60 percent of the disks were formatted before they were sold, but even formatting did not properly sanitize a disk because the Windows "format" command doesn't actually overwrite every block -- the format command just reads every block to make sure that they still work......to properly sanitize the hard drive, you need to overwrite every block."

Wow! "Gigabytes" of information left on drives already "cleaned"...

If you're OK with people snooping around your PC; if you don't have even one single file that you wouldn't want to see posted on the Internet, mailed to a competitor, or shown to someone in your life who shouldn't really see it, then you are one-in-a-million my friend.

For the rest of us – there's Jack the Shredder. Download your Free Copy Now!

 

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