DENVER -- Copies made at work or at a business like a mortgage company or accountant's office, are in many cases being saved onto the machine's hard drive. Wherever those machines go next, they could be taking your personal information along for the ride.

Sector Logics Data Recovery expert Peter Eaton recovers data from hard drives for a living. Call 7 asked him to examine some copier hard drives borrowed from a local leasing company.

“It has a lot of private information,” Eaton said.

He found a tax return and private phone records, all documents people had copied on the machine ultimately saved onto the hard drive without realizing it.

Betsy Turner lives in Connecticut but her personal information was found on a copier in Denver.

Call 7 contacted Turner and advised her that all of her phone records were found on a printer hard drive that Eaton had examined.

Turner’s reaction: “You're kidding. Holy cow!" Turner said the revelation made her feel “terrible” and “exposed.”

Terri Childress of North Star Digital Imaging said that hard drives are standard in digital office equipment and that just by making a copy, the information is often saved automatically.

Childress said, "Digital copiers are computers. Anything you can print to is a computer, which has its own brain. If you do not erase the information, if you do not treat the information as if it's confidential, it's out there."

Steve Palmer, president of Selectronics, formats hard drives regularly for his high-security clients like the White House, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and NASA but says the average person would have no way to know if the information they copied was being saved.

He showed Call 7 some copiers that he’d purchased at an auction.

“Most people lease these types of equipment, so when they're done with it, it goes back to a wholesaler someplace. Where it goes from there is anybody's guess."

Palmer said that in the current economy more people may be at risk than anyone realizes.

“You’ve got title companies going under, mortgage companies going under, and all that equipment is going to auction and wholesalers."

He also said a lot of used or outdated office equipment is sold overseas where, just like here in the States, with the right equipment, personal information could be recovered.

When asked how you know if your documents are secure, Palmer replied, "You don't."

Kinko’s employees told Call 7 that digital copies are stored for 30 days, unless a customer asks for them to be deleted sooner. They said that individual hard copies are wiped from memory when the machine is logged off.

There are settings on office copiers that will delete a document from memory after it is copied. If you're not sure how to delete the information, ask your office Information Systems person. Companies can request that the hard drives be wiped when they replace their office equipment, but unless they ask, there's no guarantee it will be done.

Our experts say home copiers don't have that kind of memory and are the best for copying personal information.

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