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.