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?
