A family member gave away some old USB sticks and memory cards that they no longer needed. They were “mildly devastated” when I told them and then proceeded to demonstrate that it’s often not that hard to recover data from such devices. “But I deleted all the files?!” Yes, but …
This can get ugly. And lots of people don’t know it.
It would be great if devices like digital cameras provided a function like “wipe storage completely”. Or, better, try harder at actually deleting files instead of doing things like just writing an 0xE5
on a FAT file system. Don’t shift the blame to the user.
I guess the situation is a bit better these days with Android encrypting everything by default and stuff like that … Hopefully.