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A comment on Apple pays out millions to student after repair techs shared her personal images. Parent comment

Re:Apple pays out millions to student after repair techs sha... by bee_rider on Monday June 07, 2021 @01:27PM (#27425323)
For once I think a car analogy is actually useful. But, in this analogy, "taking all your valuables out of the car" would be like removing all the important documents from the computer. Which would be a reasonable thing to do, I guess, if the computer shop really needed access to do the repairs that they need to do.

Another possibility -- maybe the computer is so borked that you can't even log on to remove your important documents. This seems more like calling somebody because your key broke in the lock... which... I guess most people would stick around? It is a little bit of a mismatch, because it is a quick fix and it isn't like you can go anywhere anyway.

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Re:Apple pays out millions to student after repair techs sha... by dheera on Monday June 07, 2021 @06:05PM (#27427767)
Also, people from the general public don't know how to write random bits to a drive. Deleting files doesn't actually wipe the information, it just marks the space as available on the OS. Repair agents could still take an image of the drive and recover many of those secret documents.

It should be standard procedure in the repair world to hand the hard drive to the user to take home and keep only the PC for servicing.

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Re:Apple pays out millions to student after repair techs sha... by fencepost on Tuesday June 08, 2021 @12:47AM (#27430729)
Be aware that this can be completely different between HDDs ("spinning rust") and SSDs. HDDs don't get data cleared until it's explicitly overwritten, SSDs with OSes that support TRIM shouldn't have a lot of stray data left behind.

Also when wiping SSDs get something like Parted Magic (since at least 2018 likely earlier) that can properly erase SSDs. DBAN is NOT appropriate for SSDs in any way - extra wear from the writes, and wear leveling means you have zero idea where they're actually going.

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