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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