The dangers of Copy and Paste

16 August 2007 · 2 comments

Griffin’s Tech Blog at the NZ Herald makes some interesting points today in his article: Covering your digital tracks. I’ve advised clients before now to log out of services they use while on a shared computer (webmail, banking, etc), but have never thought about the perils of Copy and Paste or trashed files. Griffin writes: [...]

Griffin’s Tech Blog at the NZ Herald makes some interesting points today in his article: Covering your digital tracks. I’ve advised clients before now to log out of services they use while on a shared computer (webmail, banking, etc), but have never thought about the perils of Copy and Paste or trashed files. Griffin writes:

I came across another example of digital recklessness — people leaving Word, Excel and PDF documents on the hotel computer after they’ve attached them to an email and sent them.

… The Trash bin had some documents in it but none of them had been deleted.

…Sitting down at a airport lounge computer once I hit CTRL V [Paste] only to bring up a proposal for a US PR company business pitch that had obviously been written in Word then copied straight into an email.

He reminds us to always copy something innocuous after ending a Copy and Paste session, so as to clear the clipboard.

So, I guess the checklist after using a shared computer is:

  • log out of any service that required a login
  • copy a Space or some other text
  • remove any thumb drives, memory cards, CDs etc
  • ideally, clear the browser History and Cache
  • empty the computer’s Trash

Any other actions we should take in such circumstances?

2 comments

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Maria 17 August 2007 at 03:12 28

Great points, Miraz. Thanks for sharing them!

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