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Comment by blahedo | Hacker News Reader

"In 2008, Sharp commissioned a survey on copier security that found 60 percent of Americans "don't know" that copiers store images on a hard drive. Sharp tried to warn consumers about the simple act of copying."

Does anyone remember this warning? I certainly heard nothing about this; and while I knew there had to be a hard drive in there to temporarily store the image, there was no reason to expect that it would store images permanently. Of course Americans "don't know" that copiers store images like that; how would we? Who had ever, EVER told us?

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Why would there have to be a hard drive? I would have assumed there was enough RAM to do a job, and that powering down the copier would clear it.

Who the heck needs the copier to remember their copying jobs long-term?

Copiers these days can do so much more, they can print, have mailboxes (for storing, archiving, printing from or to), send emails, upload to and download from shared folders, integrate into your applications, send and receive faxes and so much more. And that's just the low end, I have no idea what the advanced features are.

That explains why they have hard disks, but not why they keep simple copies on the hard disk.

I'm surprised it's only 60%!

It's WAAAAAY more than 60%, I assure you. If the HN crowd is surprised (like I am!), the millions of people who don't know a hard drive from a monitor have absolutely no idea.

I'd guess that it's more like 99.999%.

Depends on how the survey question was structured. I can imagine

Do you know that photocopiers store image on a hard drive?

would get very different response rates than

Do you know that photocopiers store image on a hard drive permanently until manually wiped?

Or even:

Do you know that photocopiers store image on a hard drive? 1) Yes 2) No

When you photocopy an image, the photocopier... 1) saves the image to a hard disk permanently. 2) temporarily stores the image until the copy is finished. 3) other

The first question leads people to lie in order to not be seen as ignorant.

>Do you know that photocopiers store image on a hard drive?

Is still pretty leading. People would say yes because they don't want to appear naive.

"Do photocopiers keep any records of copies made?"

Ah, but in that case you'd get fifty-fifty since people who had no idea would just guess.

I was considering it as an open question not a yes/no. If they say yes you ask them how. That way they are demonstrating their knowledge rather than claiming it.

Like if you wanted to find out if people know that bacon flavour crisps are vegetarian you'd ask something like "do any crisps contain meat or animal products?" and be prepared with follow on questions. So if the response is "no" you go back with "not even BBQ beef or bacon flavour?". If they answer "yes" you ask "out of these, which are suitable for vegetarians: ..." or somesuch.

Makes me wonder who the hell they asked. Copy-machine security experts working at Sharp?

It's the first I've ever heard of it, and I've been around the things and dealing with the tech side of them (networking etc) for years.

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