The figure means that 66 used hard drives out of 100 sold would contain data data about the previous owner. Half of that number would still mean that every third used hard drive sold would contain personal data. The figures seem to grow worth instead of better with every passing year. Researchers seem to concentrate on hard drives but digital cameras or mobile phones might reveal the same amount of information including personal pictures, documents, contacts and even credit card or bank account information.

How can users protect themselves and their data? The easiest way would be to stop selling used hardware that contained data at one point. That solution is not always practicable though.

The user should make sure to make the data on the storage device unrecoverable. One of the best tools for that purpose is Eraser which can be used to clear the free disk space so that the files “underneath” cannot be recovered with file recovery software anymore.

Any tips that you might want to add? Let me know.

What Microsoft has not taken into account are privacy sensitive users who do not like this type of information recorded on their system. The cleaner MRU Blaster takes care of the most recently updated files in Windows by deleting the information in Windows.

CCleaner was used to test the effectiveness of MRU Blaster by cleaning Windows with it before running MRU Blaster. Even after cleaning the system with CCleaner the program did find 257 entries that could be additionally cleaned on the system.

The user can specify the applications and locations that should be scanned and cleaned in the program’s settings which is also the location to download the two available plugins that clean cookies and temporary files.

MRU Blaster comes with a scheduler that can be set to run in specified intervals. The application has to be running in the background for this though.