With stolen identity schemes extracting personal information from websites, hard drives and even Dumpsters, there’s another place where people might not know that a digital copy is made of everything it gets: The copy machine.
It’s a problem that Assemblyman Paul Moriarty would rectify with a bill sitting on the state Senate floor which would require used copiers to be wiped of all data before being resold.
After seeing a “60 Minutes” segment in 2010 that showed how personal information could be pulled off copiers from the images it scans, Moriarty and several other Assembly members drafted and passed a bill that requires any and all copier hard drives to be erased.
However, that was back in May 2012 and it has sat on the Senate floor ever since waiting for a vote.
“I thought it was a slam dunk,” said Moriarty who says that he himself has been a victim of identity theft. “Somehow, they had found my social security number, date of birth, and home phone number. Then they had a fake ID made, so they don’t need much information to get going.”
He’s also concerned for a number of municipal agencies who are ultimately going to need to update their equipment and will be selling their older copiers in order to recoup the costs.
Currently, the bill would allow either the individual or the business to make sure that information is erased before the machine can be sold again.
However, one Glassboro-based wholesale used copier business sees a problem in leaving the onus on the consumers and resellers.
ABMcopier sells pre-owned copiers that they personally wipe clean of information before they can be resold to large companies like hospitals.
Tony Furfari, the president of ABMcopier, deals with orders of a couple hundred copy machines at a time. While his company deals with the issue on a large scale, that doesn’t make it any easier, he said.
Pulling the hard drive out of the machine may take only a few minutes, but there’s the investment of wiping the hard drive and installing software back onto the drive, which could take anywhere between “30 minutes to an hour,” he said, and cost near $100 for a single wipe.
He says in his business, it isn’t as simple as hitting a “Format Drive” button and shipping the copiers off to their next user.
“If we buy them from a customer, we pull the hard drive and send it back to them,” said Furfari. “No regular John Doe could do it themselves.”
So he sees the onus being put on the reseller. Doable for a company that ships hundreds of copiers at a time, it may be too costly for smaller resellers.
Furfari explained that there’s no software out there to wipe any and all brands of copiers — they have to buy new software each time they receive an allotment of a different model to format.
“I think they [the lawmakers] should push the manufacturing units to put a feature on the model to clean the hard drives,” said Furfari.
And while Moriarty is open to the idea, he says there are too many copiers in unaware consumers’ hands to wait until manufacturers develop the feature.
“It’s the obligation of the business to protect information that consumers put on them,” said the assemblyman, who is a former TV consumer affairs reporter.
“If that costs $50, that’s $50 well spent,” he added. “At the end of the day, business will always push back on anything that costs them a dime. Car companies didn’t want to put seat belts in cars at first.”
“To get rid of the information on the hard drives is not a huge amount of money,” said Moriarty.
http://www.nj.com/gloucester-c...information_fro.html
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