Always good to pick up a secondhand laptop and almost immediately find it's got saved emails on it labled "PRIV & CONFIDENTIAL" and "Attorney-Client Privileged Communication"

[aurelianite@estrogen.network]

@foone just curious, what do you do in such cases?

[http_error_418@hachyderm.io]

@Xavier @foone some people on my uni forensics course did that with a phone and found actual CSAM

The course leader was not impressed given that he had specifically said "don't do this because you will have a royal headache if you turn up something actually illegal"

[acp@sdf.land]

@foone I bought a Commodore 128D a week ago. Got home and discovered it had PII on it.

"but the C128 doesn't have a HDD, you mean on floppies that came with it right?" - nope, _engraved_ into the body.

[foone@digipres.club]

@acp hah!

[foone@digipres.club]

@http_error_418 @Xavier yeah. Fortunately not an issue I've run into, but I'm always anxious.

[foone@digipres.club]

@Aurelianite erase it immediately usually. Occasionally if it looks like a personal computer I'll see if I can drop them a line and go "hey I found your old files, need 'em?" and then either hand them over or erase them.

[acp@sdf.land]

@foone this is how I ended up mitigating it - really don’t want to further engrave the already not super common machine, so settling for security by “hopefully the PII will be long irrelevant by the time the next owner thinks to move the sticker”

[pootriarch@eldritch.cafe]

@foone pardon my ignorance, what does it mean to 'go to the ewaste place'? they just have racks of stuff people disposed of, and one can buy/take stuff?

[foone@digipres.club]

@pootriarch yeah. They're a company that does ewaste disposal for assorted bay area tech companies, and they sell off stuff to hobbists so it can be reused rather than ending up mined for gold or tossed in a landfill

[foone@digipres.club]

@acp clever.