This is an amazing, unbelievable – some would say shocking – revelation. Office copying machines CONTAIN hard disks that store an image of every page copied by the copier. The material is not encrypted, so if a burglar, corporate spy or identity theft ring gets hold of the copier’s hard disk, they can access a treasure trove of personal information about employees and clients. They can also access company financial information, trade secrets, pay checks… anything put on the copier is stored.

Link
Is there a specific type of copier or all of them do that Quote from: kanaan on May 28, 2010, 08:15:28 AM

Is there a specific type of copier or all of them do that

At issue are the hard drives embedded in most copiers and intelligent printers manufactured in the past five years.

Yet there are no laws to stop the Secret Service from using printer codes to secretly trace the origin of non-currency documents; only the privacy policy of your printer manufacturer currently protects you (if indeed such a policy EXISTS). And no law REGULATES what sort of documents the Secret Service or any other domestic or foreign government agency is permitted to request for identification, not to mention how such a forensics tool could be developed and implemented in printers in the first place.

I would guess that hard drives started showing up in copiers when they became combination copier and network printer.

If there was a user that was copying a big document and several other users sending jobs to the printer at the same time, it became cheaper to put in a hard drive than to add enough memory for all the jobs.

I imagine the software controlling the hard drive is either proprietary or Linux.

A simple fix would be to put a erase or delete button on the machine.