Story Time With Wuff- Always wipe your tech before reselling!
A PSA based on something that actually happened to me IRL.
So, here's something to consider if you ever want to sell your hard drive, computer, phone- Whatever. Do NOT sell it before wiping the damn thing, otherwise you could have all kinds of shady shit happen to you. Don't believe me? I have a story to tell you, to show you just how easy it is for someone to find out who you are and get a hold of your personal details.
So I bought a used computer on Ebay, a Packard-Bell Multimedia computer to play Windows 98 and MS-DOS games on. The seller said it had no OS on it and the drive was wiped, and I've got a legit, bootable copy of Windows 98 Second Edition, and I bought the computer. I open the thing up and... Well, guess what? Turns out the seller never actually confirmed that the drive was wiped and the first thing I saw was a bunch of baby pictures.
Now, that's a big red flag right there that maybe the seller wasn't too tech-literate. But the previous owner, let's just call him RT, I'm not going to reveal enough to identify the previous owner, didn't just leave baby pictures of his daughter and dog on the computer. He left an HTML document giving the daughter's full name, and the town in Texas where they lived. After looking through phone directories, I managed to find the grandmother of the baby, and then that led me to the previous owner. And by the time I knew what is phone number was, I knew his home address and from there, if I had any malicious intent, it would have been too late.
But I privately informed RT of my discovery, I called him and gave him my cell number and he called me back a few days later. I told him that I'd found the old baby photos and I'd send them to him (he asked me to just get rid of them- I did), and warned him to always be careful and wipe any drives off any computers you ever sell.
If I had been some kind of criminal, or a swatter, or who knows what else, say, some convict bought RT's computer instead of me, think of the damage knowing how to get in touch with him could have caused. So don't stick your neck out like RT did. All it takes is one careless file on a piece of tech you sold and ten minutes on Google for bad, bad things to happen.
Now, things didn't turn out badly for RT, since I had no intent of misusing that information and I gave him a calm, amicable warning to be careful with the kinds of things that can happen if you don't wipe your tech before reselling it. He took the message and I explained how I found him, and we had a nice, amicable talk.