Beware: Your Old Xbox Stores Personal Information

MurderousToaster

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Aug 9, 2008
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Mrs Podhradsky, well done. I can see that university education is working wonders. You just figured out how a hard drive works. At this rate, she'll have RAM figured out by this time next year.
 

Fiad

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Apr 3, 2010
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Another reason I never put my credit card info into a console. Between all the hacks, thefts, and things like this it is just much safer for me to go out and buy a point card. Also keeps me from making spur of the moment purchases. Steam has done that enough to me.
 

Treblaine

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Jul 25, 2008
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"all of your personal information is stored on the console's hard drive - even if you wipe the drive clean."

Welcome to 1970's, we've known this about ALL HARD DRIVES for the past 4 decades. There is nothing special about Xbox. Every single device with a hard drive has this feature that "deleting" data is not necessarily actually destroyed. Even when you actively write over it, with the right software you can look closely enough.

It's like half rubbing out something you write in pencil then writing over it again. If you look carefully enough you can faintly see what was written before.
 

Davey Woo

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Jan 9, 2009
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I'm pretty sure this happens with any storage device.
When you wipe a hard drive of any type (console or pc) it just wipes the bit of the disc that tells the computer/console WHERE on the disk the necessary data is located. So the data is still there, but standard programs won't be able to access it any more.

I'm pretty sure you'd be able to get soemthing back even if you totally wiped a disk 2 or 3 times, they're hardy little bastards.
 

synobal

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Jun 8, 2011
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Why would you store credit card information locally, that is awful, christ could you imagine if steam stored credit card info locally? How retarded is that microsoft.
 

DracoSuave

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Jan 26, 2009
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Thank god this didn't happen on a game console with a high rate of failure, where said method of redress was refurbishing used consoles while you send in your broken one to be refurbished.
 

karloss01

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Jul 5, 2009
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this occurs with anything with a hand drive, does it on PC, PS3, Wii, Xbox, phones and anything else you can store data on. really isn't news its on of the basic facts about harddrives. they don't erase memory they just inform the system that that area of the hard disc can be written over again.
 

AstylahAthrys

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Apr 7, 2010
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Good thing that my old one only had expired info on it. I did sell it when it and upgraded to a slim when the new model came out. (I had a launch console that was out of warranty and slowly dying.) Hopefully my hard drive ended up with a 10 year old who doesn't know RAM memory from hard drive space.
 

El Luck

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Jul 22, 2011
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Also birds fly, ducks quack and Fosters is bloody horrible.

I'm slightly disturbed by the fact that to some, this is new information.
 

Jabberwock xeno

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Oct 30, 2009
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Hmm...

And didn't the navy just start a program to get info from used consoles?

*insert creepy Oooouooouooo sound effect"