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How does this work?

Sainix

Well-Known Member
Aug 27, 2010
158
2
Ok i always hear that police can take your computer and see everything you have ever done. How can they do this like see what sites you have been to what you downloaded what you typed in. I am just trying to figure out if this is real or fake? It seems to me if your history always clears then how can they find out what you look at or type in? does your internet service give out this info on there request? are there files in your computer that store this info?

I did not do anything wrong and no i am not getting in trouble i would really just like to know how this works
 
There are a lot of questions to be answered here. First of all, they need a warrant to get any of the information. As fas as what they can see, it's complicated. Leaving out what your ISP and sites you use store, clearing your history does get rid of the data to a certain extent. It is cleared from easy viewing but because of the way a hard drive works, the data can still be on the drive until it is overwritten. Getting to that data may not be easy, but it could be there.

You should be less worried about your local computer and more worried about what websites capture about you. The best example it Google. Being that this is an android forum, I am sure you have a Gmail account. That serves as your Google account and you'd be amazed at how much information they have about you. Just think about it, they store your email, calendar, searches, videos you watch, and more. Now generally they just use that to serve you more relevant ads so that you will click them but under certain circumstances the police can request much of this information. Google's CEO once said:
If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place. If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines - including Google - do retain this information for some time and it's important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities.

Now, don't start getting paranoid and not using the computer. Just be smart. You can control some of the information that sites store. For example, Google does give you access to some privacy settings in your account page. As long as you don't do anything illegal, you will be fine.
 
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IT forensic tools are remarkably adept at retrieving information long thought removed from storage mediums. If you are truly concerned about someone finding something in your hard drive, short of reformatting the drive or physically destroying the magnetic disk (such as breaking it or exposing it to a powerful magnet), it is safe practice to consider all information in your hard drive ultimately retrievable. This doesn't mean that it will be, since a disk can easily reuse a section and overwrite old data in it. You don't want o rely on that though.
 
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Data which has been deleted using the standard tools with most OSs can nearly always be undeleted, unless it's been overwritten by newer data. However there are many tools which will permanently erase unused HDD space by overwriting it with random data, multiple times, often to US DoD standards. I'm pretty sure that no forensics tool can get data back which has been overwritten multiple times with random stuff. Deleted data which has been overwritten 35 times with gibberish, I'm certain that data is not going to be retrieved by anything or anybody.
 
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