Your doctor, lawyer, or tax preparer could all be unwittingly giving away your very private information. And they’re doing it by using copy machines. You may already be a victim and not even know it, reports Tony Lopez of CBS Station KOVR in Sacramento.

The copy machine is an important and seemingly harmless part of our lives. And when it’s time to upgrade, the old ones are sometimes sent to e-waste centers for recycling, but usually they wind-up in a wholesale warehouse on the used copier market.

KOVR went to one of two in Sacramento with John Juntunen, an expert on the copy machine business. There were hundreds of machines, shrink wrapped, and ready to shipment.

“You’re looking at 15, 20 thousand documents each” Juntunen says – documents that still reside inside. Most copy machines use hard drives to store every document that has been scanned, printed, faxed, or e-mailed.

That electronic file will stay there until someone removes it or new documents push out the oldest ones.

via CBS News.

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