Discarded PC Had AIDS, STD Patient Names

Computers

from the oops dept

Last month Simson Garfinkel made tons of news by showing that random hard drives he bought on eBay contained all sorts of private information that their previous owners did not clean up carefully enough. It seems that not everyone got the message. The state of Kentucky has been caught trying to sell off a computer that still contained a ton of information about patients with various sexually transmitted diseases, including their names and number of sexual partners. The only reason this machine was caught was because it was randomly selected by auditors to make sure the hard drive had been wiped clean.