Slashdot Mirror
FTC Targets Copy Machine Privacy Concerns
itwbennett writes "In a letter to US Representative Ed Markey, FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz said that the FTC has begun contacting copy machine makers, resellers, and office supply stores to inform them about privacy concerns over the images that can be stored on the machines' hard drives and trying to 'determine whether they are warning their customers about these risks ... and whether manufacturers and resellers are providing options for secure copying.'"
When I was involved in a tender for MFCs five years ago, this was one of the issues raised... by the vendors. Some claimed they were the only ones that had it, but they were wrong. All the major ones had it. At that time they offered both encryption of all userdata on the local hard drive, and also automatic overwriting of all user data after it was printed.
At the time these were options that one needed to pay extra for, but for anybody concerned with privacy issues, it was available.
One can, of course, ask why the above options are not standard. After all, it is just a question of enabling some software options.
That's nothing.
Lots of places still use old brother fax / copy / print machines which utilize "ribbons" instead of ink or toner. This is what they look like
PC-301
It's basically a big carbon transfer sheet. You find these old machines in doctors offices. law offices. etc. Where the owner is too lazy to upgrade their hardware.
They throw out the used ribbon. Guess what? Its literally hundreds of feet of perfect, inverted copies of faxed information. Forms with medical information. SSN numbers. Private legal information. ETC.
All it requires is someone to be lazy enough to throw it away, and someone else bored enough to go dumpster dive.
You put a stack of papers into them, hit the copy 10 times button. It has to print 10 stacks of papers. You want to stand there shoving the paper through 10 times while it does it?
Deleted
Of course they don't give a damn about the serial numbers that each copier embeds in every page they print.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.