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.
I decided to take them with me just to tinker around with them and see if anything was wrong with them.
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.
I then went ahead and mounted the internal drive, and to my surprise, it was not wiped.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
When I tried to look through it's internal drive, it was already dead, so there's that.
To wrap this all up though, I would like to close with this:
WIPE THE DATA ON YOUR MACHINES BEFORE YOU THROW THEM OUT, THANK YOU
Signed,
Lilium_Snow (Primrose)