Memories of a Media Card

twistedmoney99 writes "Anyone who has upgraded their digital camera probably has a few older, incompatible media cards lying around — so why not post them on Ebay? Well, if you do, be sure to properly wipe them because the digital voyeurs are watching. Seth Fogie at InformIT.com purchased a bunch of used cards from Ebay and found recoverable data on most of them. Using the freely available PhotoRec application, he was able to extract pictures, movies, and more from apparently formatted cards. The picture is clear — wipe anything that can store digital data before getting rid of it."

Comments

Re:speaking of wiping data

[timeOday]

dd bs=1024 if=/dev/random of=/dev/sda1

That was my system boot partition, you insensitive clod!

As for erasing solid state media, I'd feel perfectly safe simply overwriting it with zeroes, one time over.

I realize years ago magnetic media were written sparsely (inefficiently) with sloppy positioning mechanisms, but those days are long gone. I'd be really impressed to see somebody recover overwritten data on a hard drive instead of just talking about it.

As for flash memory, I'll believe it when I see it.

As for leaking information through discarded camera memory cards in the first, place, it's about the 1000th thing down my list of privacy concerns, way down below "binoculars." If you want to see pictures of random people's snapshots of each other, they're all over the web. How many of us really use our digicams to capture super-secret info? I just can't bring myself to care when I know databases of thousands of credit card numbers and SSNs are being bought and sold on the black market.

Card not wiped because people don't care

[syousef]

I'm sure a lot of people don't wipe the camera cards because they don't care if someone gets photos of their pets or disney vacation or drunken stupor. They figure most people - ie. those not interested in writing an alarmist privacy article - will simply wipe and use the card. Unless you're a celebrity, or have a stalker why would you care? You're probably photographed more by traffic cameras these days anyway.

Re:Card not wiped because people don't care

[Kelson]

There's also the possibility that they might not have a way to delete it. If, for instance, the only thing they have that reads the card is the camera itself (and they've been retrieving images via USB), and the reason they're discarding the card is that the camera itself is broken, and their new camera uses different media...

I can see the thought process going from "crap, I left some photos on there" to "eh, they're already on Flickr anyway." Unless there are photos that they haven't already downloaded, there's less motivation to track down something that will read (and erase) the card.

Re:Who cares?

[ivan_13013]

Throwing away or destroying manufactured items when they are working and reusable is irresponsible, because it does not attempt to minimize environmental impact.

Used items that are still in demand should be reused as much as possible, to reduce the demand for manufacturing these items (with all the power and waste involved in that) and the size of landfills.

Exactly, I question the premise

[SuperKendall]

From the article:

In addition, the fact that some of the cards contained undeleted images is a bit disconcerting. At a bare minimum media card owners should have deleted the viewable images.

Why? Why should they have, if they don't care who saw them? As they said, the images were all of clothed people and disney world and things, worth nothing to anyone but the owner.

Privacy just for the sake of privacy seems to have taken hold of too many people, who do not stop to think - is there any point to privacy in this instance?

Obviously if people did not want images being seen they should remove them; I just object to catiioning users against leaving images with the vague fear that "someone may see thier images" when that may not matter at all.