gHacks has advice for anyone planning on getting rid of a digital camera:

Many people sell their old digital camera when they buy a new one. Those cameras are often sold on sites like eBay and it is a wise move to make sure that all photos in the internal memory and on external smartcards are not readable anymore. This might not be a big problem if you simply took some pictures of landscapes all the time but it soon becomes one if you took personal and private pictures with that camera.

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External memory cards on the other hand are easier to delete but also easier to recover. If you simply delete the pictures anyone with a recovery program will be able to recover all pictures on that card. There is however an easy way to be on the safe side. Simply use the software Eraser on the smartcard to delete all information on it and make it impossible by normal means to recover the files on that card.

This is very good advice.  Think about it, do you want your holiday snaps or pictures of your kids falling into someone else's hands?  No?  Well, wipe the memory.  Since flash memory is different to hard drives, you don't need to go nuts and carry out dozens of overwrites - one or two will do just fine and will mean that your private snaps remain private.

The same advice goes for your hard drives and any other gadget you get rid of that stores data - cellphones, PDAs, old PCs and so on.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 9th, 2007 at 13:25 and is filed under PC Doctor's Useful Links, Stay Secure. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.