The Federal Trade Commission has responded to a letter released by Congressman Ed Markey, who wrote to the agency over concerns that copiers may be hiding digital copies of scanned documents.
Most high-end digital copiers sold today store the scanned documents on flash memory or hard drives, which can pose a security risk if the drives themselves are either lost or resold.
Last month, CBS News filed an investigative report noting that many digital copiers hide hard drives inside of them, which in fact store the documents users copy on them: medical records, pay stubs, even details of narcotics operations.
Most copiers and even fax machines store images in local memory, then, over time, the buffer becomes overrun. Companies like Xerox also supply utilities that can overwrite the drive’s contents. CBS, however, visited a warehouse where previously owned copiers could be purchased for under $400. And those copiers contained hard drives, which stored the images until the drive itself was removed.
CBS nabbed a major insurance company as well as Buffalo, N.Y. law enforcement agencies with data stored on the drives.
