Personal computer privacy: Analysis for Korean PC users

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce our own two-year experiments to acquire sensitive personal information from discarded hard disks which we had obtained with no ease in Korean second-hand PC markets. With careful scanning, we found that most of hard disks were not adequately cleaned, and had a plenty of confidential and sensitive personal data, which could be utilized in crimes like identity theft. Collected private data, analyzed based on the concept of identifiable individual, amounted to 4,526 persons worth of data, including 3,584 resident registration numbers. The result also indicated that discovered data items of each person were revealed to display a wide spectrum of sensitivity level.