It says in the article that he had to use forensic / recovery software to extract the images from the drive. That suggests to me that they were deleted, just not overwritten.

It's just like "deleting" a file off of your desktop PC; it's unlinked, but the data is still physically present on the drive platters until it happens to be overwritten, unless you make a special effort to overwrite it -- and most applications don't do that.

I'm not sure that it's really a flaw in the copier design, because they're not intentionally retaining the images any more than your PC is intentionally designed to retain Word documents that you "delete" without overwriting.

The problem is that many users are unaware that a modern photocopier even contains a hard drive ... they are probably oblivious of the fact that modern copiers have little in common with the traditional photostatic machines they grew up with, except that they're faster and don't smell as much. Manufacturers need to better educate buyers (or lessees) about the machines they're using, and perhaps make hard drives more accessible so that when they're sold, they can have the drives removed and destroyed first.

The headline of the HN article is a bit misleading.

"using a forensic software program available for free on the Internet, he ran a scan - downloading tens of thousands of documents in less than 12 hours."

Since he had to use special software to extract the files, it looks like the software deletes the files, but not securely. Basically, it uses 'rm' instead of 'scrub'.

As explained below, storing scanned pages temporarily is good when photocopying (or faxing) multiple pages.

Also, the creator of the software mentioned (securely wipes photocopier harddrives) is a very smart marketer. The article is basically an advertisement for his software, "INFOSWEEP," and he's the one who showed the journalist this vulnerability in the first place.

You need it to do multiple copies, double sided copies, collated etc. All the major maker's built-in software does overwrites of the data to various levels of security. Otherwise the government wouldn't buy them.

They also have fairly small drives - the companies are out to make money - so at somewhere like kinkos your job would be overwritten multiple times by the end of the day. It's only an issue if the system fails and the drive needs to be replaced - but anywhere operating under any sort of security regs would destroy the drive before it went off site.

We used to destroy them along with any waste explosive/munitions. Then health and safety stopped us and we had to buy a super monster shredder - which is a lot scarier than explosives but it can shred drives/entire files/interns etc.

This, actually, was the first thing that came to mind:

http://www.eff.org/issues/printers

Short-term storage is useful for things like being able to make 5 photocopies of a document--- old copiers would have to literally run the copier across the document 5 times to do so. Now they're more like scanner->printer, so they scan once and print 5 times. They don't delete it immediately after the job either, because many copiers support convenience features like "ok, 2 more copies of that last document please". It does seem like they could delete once N more documents have been printed in between, though.

i'd quite curious about this, myself.

the answer is also necessary to figure out how many images are probably being stored. if the copier is just keeping them for debugging reasons (which would explain why nobody knows they're there), then they could very well be highly compressed 72dpi images.