I'm wondering about the ethics surrounding hard drives. I don't mean legal ethics so much as personal ethics. I have bought a variety of computer parts on ebay and in a local building material salvage yard, and I seem to have this uncanny knack for winding up with hard drives just loaded with personal information which simply should never have been mine to see. Like compromising photographs, resumes, school, personnel files, even social security numbers, home addresses, bank account information. It is shocking, and it makes me feel "dirty" just seeing it. I'm an honest person and I would never use any of it to harm anyone, but still.... People don't realized how careless they are. And some of them ought to know better. A few weeks ago I bought a laptop hard drive said to have been pulled from a "working laptop." Yes it was, and it was a complete system, loaded with files, correspondence, chat dialogues and intimate photos of the former user, a teenage girl. I wiped and reformatted it, then cloned an older smaller drive onto it. The girl can consider herself lucky I'm not a stalker.

So much for drive one.

Next, yesterday I bought a nice Pentium 3 machine at a local salvage yard for ten bucks. Which is next to nothing considering it turned out to be a very usable machine. I thought I was buying it for parts, as it looked dirty and funky, and stuff was rattling around inside, so when I got it home I opened up the case to take an inventory. Nice 30 Gig removable hard drive, good sound card, NVIDIA PCI video card, network card, and one of those kickass ASUS motherboards which are great for overclocking. The rattling around was caused by loose RAM which had been taken out, so I figured it probably wouldn't work, but what the hell. I put it back together, plugged in a monitor, speakers, keyboard, mouse, and network cables, plugged in the power cord and turned it on. Windows XP started right up. Everything worked. I would never name names, but it's just crammed with years of a lawyer's professional and personal files, confidential information about clients, cases, and loan applications, even including his wife's social security number and credit information. I don't know what to do. I would contact the guy, but he might get mad. At me! I didn't do a damned thing except gamble ten bucks and push a button.

Then there's the computer I'm working from right now. It's an old clunker laptop sold on ebay for parts because it was inoperable and gave RAM and "hard drive not found" errors. The reason for the RAM error was that one of the sticks of RAM was bad (or incompatible) and the reason the hard drive was not found was because someone had forgotten to stick the adaptor onto the pins, so it wasn't hooked up. The "parts" computer turned out to be completely usable, so now I feel guilty about unwittingly invading the privacy of a chemical engineer from India whose entire recent life is on that drive (photographs, resumes, immigration documents, and complex stuff I don't understand). Obviously, I should wipe or reformat the drives and/or delete the personal stuff, and my goal is to continue my Linux comparisons. But I'm grappling over basic ownership theories here. Who owns this stuff? I bought it, so in theory I would be the "owner." Of what? The drives? What's on them? Do I own the operating systems? Do I now "own" the photos? Someone else's work product? Am I invading people's privacy? And suppose there was illegal stuff in there? Would I own that too? Or would I merely "possess" it without "owning" it? I like to think Ownership is fuzzy. So are the moral issues:

Sales between individuals pretty much always include the software, whether or not it's actually legal, and it would be naive to ignore the value. If you build a new PC and you go out and buy Windows XP and Microsoft Office (OEM versions), you've just spent a few hundred dollars on software. If you purchase a used computer or receive a hand-me-down which has this software installed, even if it's Windows 98 and Office 97, you can get right to work. Again, I'm not preaching about morality here and I don't really understand the legal issues involved in using software that's licensed to the original owner, I'm just reporting how things are. I would say the cheapest you can legally obtain a copy of Windows XP and Microsoft Word for (not the full office) is still over $200 if you build your own PC.

It really seems like such a no brainer. I thought everyone knew that you don't make available the contents of your hard drive. In fact, it's so basic that I doubt there's a single reader of this blog who does not know that. So what's with three in a row? A teenage girl I can understand, but an attorney? An engineer?

If only I enjoyed being a voyeur!