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Your Old Copy Machine a Security Risk?

If this is true (and it appears so, I’m just using conditional since it’s so insane .. beyond insane) discarded old photocopiers may represent a huge security / privacy risk.

Nearly every digital copier built since 2002 contains a hard drive – like the one on your personal computer – storing an image of every document copied, scanned, or emailed by the machine.

Used, discarded copiers then get sold without the previous owners having a clue about all the data they just let go of. In a way it’s worse then disposing an old computer with a “live” hard disk – at least in the case of the computer, you know what information may still reside in it…

A random pick of 3 units from a warehouse showed data from sex crime and drug related police investigations, building designs, payment records with names and social security numbers, and detailed medical records from drug prescriptions, to blood test results, to a cancer diagnosis – with names of the patients.

A huge, huge timebomb.

Read the full story on CBS News


Watch CBS News Videos Online

(Cross-posted @ CloudAve)

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Google Health & Microsoft HealthVault: the Sorry State of Health 2.0

Today’s joint IBM – Google announcement about enabling personal health monitoring devices to send data directly to Google Health gave me the grand opportunity for a (not-so) quick rant that’s been boiling in me for a while. 

Ever since I started actively managing my parents’ health care I’ve been a heavy user of electronic health records and communication systems, and I am immensely frustrated.  Frustrated at the paper-based world we’re facing in the 21st century, but also at the current attempts to change all that.  Grand ideas, alliances, announcements, but they all feel like IT-talk, losing sight of the very people these systems supposed to serve: patients.  That’s you and me and our relatives who have health issues.  

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