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<h1>15 - I found a laptop with a boatload of personal data still on it</h1>
<h2>Date: 2023-03-04</h2>
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<pstyle="text-align: left">Last Sunday, I was downstairs in the basement of my apartment building, where I stumbled across two laptops. Both looked fairly old, and upon closer inspection later, were from 2012-2013.</p>
<pstyle="text-align: left">I decided to take them with me just to tinker around with them and see if anything was wrong with them.</p>
<pstyle="text-align: left">The HP machine was in pretty good condition, so I decided to take a look at that one first. I went ahead and inserted a USB with Linux Mint on it, and booted the machine up.</p>
<pstyle="text-align: left">I then went ahead and mounted the internal drive, and to my surprise, it was not wiped.</p>
<pstyle="text-align: left">I was able to go through the documents and downloads folder of the previous owner, and oh boy, was there a LOT of personal data on it.</p>
<pstyle="text-align: left">Documents such as passport applications, scans of drivers licenses, bank statements, and more could be found RIGHT THERE on the drive. I was in awe at how someone could just toss a machine out like this.</p>
<pstyle="text-align: left">The previous owner didn't even bother taking out the hard drive, even though it could have been taken out by removing two screws on the bottom of the machine.</p>
<pstyle="text-align: left">I was planning on contacting the previous owner about their very stupid mistake, but by the time I tried to access the data on the drive again, the drive started failing on me and giving me a bunch of input/output errors, so I wasn't able to.</p>
<pstyle="text-align: left">The Dell machine on the other hand, was in poor condition, and looked like it was used by a child judging by the stickers on the machine.</p>
<pstyle="text-align: left">When I tried to look through it's internal drive, it was already dead, so there's that.</p>
<pstyle="text-align: left">To wrap this all up though, I would like to close with this:</p>
<pstyle="text-align: left">WIPE THE DATA ON YOUR MACHINES BEFORE YOU THROW THEM OUT, THANK YOU</p>
