How much info does my computer keep?

Factual Questions
1

I just got spammed with this:

"…Did you know for example that every click you make on Windows 98 Start Menu is logged and stored permanently on a hidden encrypted database within your own computer?

Deleting “internet cache and history”, will not protect you… Any of the Web Pages, Pictures, Movies, Videos, Sounds, E-mail and Everything Else you or anyone else have ever viewed could easily be recovered - even many years later!"

the company’s website is

http://www.evidence-eliminator.com

Is any of this true? My gut is screaming BS, but i truelly don’t know enough about computers to tell. A couple things that keep me on the ‘no’ side:

  1. it would take up WAY too much hard drive space to be practical to keep such records
  2. there is really no good reason to keep such information
  3. It could become such an invasion of privacy, a huge group of people would protest.

any help?

chris

2

Try poking around in the \windows\applog directory (it’s a hidden directory). Not everything is stored in there, and it’s not permanent, or encrypted, but it’s still a lot of stuff. Most of the files (the *.lgc files) are plain text files. This seems to be a log of programs you’ve run under windows (including programs in a DOS box). As to web pages, email, movies, etc., I don’t think any of that is stored in a central database in windows :wink:

Arjuna34

3

thanks arjuna. i guess my next question would be, why would this information be stored in the first place? does it speed up or slow down performance?

chris

4

I have no idea why it’s stored. Knowing Microsoft, I have to assume that it slows things down :slight_smile: At best, maybe it speeds something up that was unnaturally slow to begin with.
I have a feeling it’s for disaster recovery, or something like that.

Arjuna34

5

Two addition questions along the lines of the O.P.-

A. How do you go about finding and reading these files?

B. I’ve heard that MS Outlook Express never completely deletes your mail, even if you click delete. I heard, ages ago, a way to force OE to delete 'em and now have forgotten them. Does this ring a bell?

6

I, too, am interested in any answers to these questions.

As far as the OP goes, I don’t know if there are specific directories that copy this information to the hard drive. I do know that computers save information in clusters on the hard drive, so that if you delete something, it still may be accessible. I think that’s how certain undelete programs work—if you haven’t copied over all of the clusters, then someone may still find the information. I think that’s what Evidence Eliminator is supposed to do—rewrite (overwrite?)information so that it cannot be retrieved.

It seems that a person can still access this information if they have the right tools. The only software program I’ve seen that’s available to the public (very expensive, too) is Encase. It’s what law enforcement uses in their computer investigations. There are undelete programs available, but I’m not sure of what information they are able to recover.

Anyway, I am no computer expert, so if I have made any mistakes, please correct me. I’ve included a link from abcnews.com which answers some questions regarding deleting email.

http://abcnews.go.com/sections/tech/Geek/geek000615.html
thanks

7

When you first delete a message in OE, it goes into your Deleted Items folder. Messages stay there until you either empty the folder by right-clicking on it and choose Empty Deleted Items Folder (or something to that effect) or go into the folder by clicking on it and manually delete the messages, either individually or en masse. Once you do that, they’re gone for good (if they weren’t, eventually you’d run out of space on your hard drive). I’m not running OE here at work, but I believe there may be a way to get it to purge deleted messages automatically.

8

Ahaaa… a question I can use my work-related expertise at. I’ve spent the last couple years working on a piece of software which solely exists to take your old email and archive it onto tape or hard disk, without you ever knowing it’s gone. No, it’s not spy software. It’s something that your IS guys would install so that old emails don’t sit around taking up disk space on your server forever.

The answer to “When is my email really deleted?” is complicated. Note that all this only pertains to Microsoft Exchange, which is an email engine widely used on Windows networks. If your email uses another engine, then disregard everything I say. I don’t know how anything but Exchange works.

Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express are email front ends, not email engines. They simply provide a means for you to look at and organize your email. When you compose a piece of email and hit “Send” it’s sent to an email engine, such as Microsoft Exchange. Exchange then does the dirty work of making sure the right person gets it. By default, Exchange keeps one big database that stores ALL the email messages a particular site sends. That means that you and all your coworker’s email is sitting on an Exchange server somewhere in your company.

UNLESS (there’s always an UNLESS) you tell Outlook to set up a personal email database stored on your private hard drive. If you’re worried about email getting deleted, I’d suggest you do this.

In the first scenario, where your email is actually stored on the Exchange server, after you choose “Empty Deleted Items” from Outlook, it marks your email as “deleted.” But it’s not gone yet. At some point in the future, Exchange will go through it’s database and actually delete your mail. Unless (yup, another UNLESS) you deleted a message that was shared among a group of people - ie, you sent one message to more than one email address. If you try to delete one of these, it’s only deleted when ALL the people who received that message delete it.

So the moral of the story is, if you want your email really deleted, set up a personal database where your mail is delivered, and never send or receive email that has more than one addressee. That’ll work, UNLESS (of course) you have this software package that I’m writing installed. Then your old email is sitting on a tape somewhere in your company, and we NEVER erase it. You could set fire to the tape, I suppose. That would do it… unless someone made a copy… shall I go on?

9

Athena, isn’t there a setting in Exchange server that you can set that prevents the deletion of email until it’s been backed up on tape? I seem to recall seeing a checkbox like that somewhere (either in Exchange Server or Backup Exec, our backup software).

Arjuna34

10

Arjuna34: Probably. I’m guessing that BE (another product from my illustrious company) probably has an option like that for backing up the Exchange database.

The product I’m working on is a little different. It’s main focus is for people who don’t delete their email because they might need it in the future. You tell our software “Purge everything older than X days old” and it takes any email that meets that criteria and puts it on tape. The email still shows up in Outlook. It’s just that when you click on it to open it you’ll have a little delay while the email is retrieved from tape (or wherever you happened to put it - it could be on some big hard drive somewhere, too.)

11

Athena

Is there a market for your software? A lot of things I have been reading say that buisnesses should adopt a policy of deleating old emails. The reason being is that when they get sued there will not be this huge data base of stuff for laywers to sift through to find a bad statement.

As for every thing you do being logged that is simply not true you will runout of disk space fairly quickly.

Deleting “internet cache and history”, will not protect you… Any of the Web Pages, Pictures, Movies, Videos, Sounds, E-mail and
Everything Else you or anyone else have ever viewed could easily be recovered - even many years later!"

You might be able to make a file of all the urls you looked at. I sometimes run a web radio over my cable modem. It will not take to many days of listening to that to fill up the hard drive.

This program looks like it knows all the hidden logs and will really delete them. This means writting over the file with random data a bunch of times. Poeple can difinately take your computer and find out a lot of what you do. Just not every thing forever.

12

gazpach Yes, there is a market for the software. It’s not huge, but it’s there. There are businesses who delete old email, but there’s an equal amount who want to save all email for a certain period of time for legal reasons. There’s also a lot of people who just want to save all their email so they can go back at some point in the future and look at it.

We’re not selling it hand over fist, but being a company whose primary business is storage software, we need this product so we have full coverage of all kinds of storage needs. Or something like that. I’m not a marketeer, I’m an engineer!

13

No.
The site you linked to in the first message is nothing more than a company trying to scare you into paying money for unnecessary programs. This determination is based on the fact that they use unlikely scenarios, and liberal amounts of bold text spouting messages such as “You could go to jail!” or “You could lose your job!” to persuade you to buy their crap.

Furthurmore, most of the functions are readily available in many other programs that are free, or built right into the OS already. All this program does is make bring everything into one window.

Lastly, no legitimate company advertises by way of SPAM emails. This is illegal, if I recall correctly.

14

Stupendous Man

Many companies advertise by mass mailings. I get stuff from REI, egghead and the like. SPAM is a very loose term heyjoe might have left checked the box on some somewhere like “from time to time we like to extend offers from third parties to our subscribers do you want to participate?” If he said yes I don’t think this the email is illegal spam.

Bringing everything into one window is a very useful thing. Do you know all the things to track down and how to make sure it is really erased not just removed from the directory list? one_madjack and CnotCris don’t know otherwise they would not be asking their questions.

Is it worth $80 to solve this problem not to me and not to you.

15

The following link gives specific info about what Outlook Express does and doesn’t leave on your hard drive. And it’s more than you’d expect, even after emptying your deleted items.

The site doesn’t seem to have an archive of previous stories, so it won’t be there for long…

As for what info a company might retain in Microsoft Exchange Server (even when you delete items), the only safe working assumption I can think of would be every single last bit of it. If you’re using a corporate email system, then the corporation owns it, and they manage it how they see fit.