Photocopiers & ID Theft
I read an interesting article this week on MSNBC:
Now, experts are warning that photocopiers could be a culprit as well.
That’s because most digital copiers manufactured in the past five years have disk drives — the same kind of data-storage mechanism found in computers — to reproduce documents. As a result, the seemingly innocuous machines that are commonly used to spit out copies of tax returns for millions of Americans can retain the data being scanned.
Source: Your new ID-theft worry? Photocopiers
What the article doesn’t explain is *why* photocopiers have a disk drive installed, and why these disk drives are storing copies of documents rather than just rewriting them (if the disk drives are so necessary to operation).
What’s so scary about this? How many people make photocopies at the corner store? At Staples and other office supply stores? Public libraries? The disk drives may not have been a well-known feature in copy machines, but after this article–they are now!