Dear Thomas V. Hubbell...

[bjarvis]

You don't know me, but I've learned a great deal about you since the refurbished Palm Tungsten E2 you returned to Circuit City arrived at my home this afternoon. I won more than I thought with that particular eBay auction.

I have your home & cell numbers so I suppose I could give you a call to give you the news, but it's more fun to do it here.

Seriously, dude, if you're planning a career in law enforcement --according to your resume-- you should know a bit about identity theft & how to avoid it. Things like shredding old documents, not giving out key information and erasing data from electronic devices before giving them away. OK, I know you're a little young but with a 3.8 GPA, you should know better. Your girlfriend Kim seems very pretty so perhaps she distracted you; I have her telephone numbers too, so I suppose I could ask.

BTW, I hope you do well on your Math 120 quiz this afternoon. It's on sections 4.4 and 4.6, in case you've forgotten.

Luv,
Brian

Comments

[unzeugmatic.livejournal.com]

At the LISA conference a couple of years ago (the one in Atlanta, I think) somebody gave a talk about a study/paper he worked one: He bought various refurbished/used disk devices off eBay to see what information he could find on them. He found all sorts of things he should not have found, like bank records. (He called the bank to let them know about this incredible security breach and they didn't care at all about the security problem, they just wanted to be sure they weren't going to be sued).

The point of his talk was to teach the sysadmins how to REALLY delete things from a disk. But my gosh, what an amazing thing.

So it's not necessarily the fault of the guy who owned this originally, at least not completely. There are other security measures that should be in place elsewhere.

[bjarvis.livejournal.com]

So it's not necessarily the fault of the guy who owned this originally, at least not completely. There are other security measures that should be in place elsewhere.

I think the guy who owned the E2 had a responsibility to the folks listed in his PDA to erase their entries before passing the PDA to someone --anyone-- else. And Circuit City had a responsibility to him to wipe out all traces of any information before reselling the thing. Both parties failed, IMHO.

My current employer is very paranoid about data on disks. When we decommission hard drives in any form, they're treated like nuclear waste: they're carefully inventoried, tagged & placed into locked storage for the next 50,000+ years. No retired disk leaves the company. Needless to say, like nuclear waste, we're running out of storage space.

[unzeugmatic.livejournal.com]

Both parties failed, IMHO

Sure, but many people honestly don't know or understand what disk storage even means in the first place. The guy certainly should have erased the info, but he didn't necessarily know how this whole thing would work -- or he may not have the background or training to be sensitive to the issues here (it's not just "common sense", although it certainly seems so once you know how this works). The refurbisher, on the other hand, is the professional here, and that's where I think the primary professional and ethical obligations lie.

Still, maybe you can hire yourself out to various schools and vocational programs to give presentations on Identity Theft 101. Bring a copy of this journal entry!