It says in the article that he had to use forensic / recovery software to extract the images from the drive. That suggests to me that they were deleted, just n

It says in the article that he had to use forensic / recovery software to extract the images from the drive. That suggests to me that they were deleted, just not overwritten. It's just like "deleting" a file off of your desktop PC; it's unlinked, but the data is still physically present on the drive platters until it happens to be overwritten, unless you make a special effort to overwrite it -- and most applications don't do that. I'm not sure that it's really a flaw in the copier design, because they're not intentionally retaining the images any more than your PC is intentionally designed to retain Word documents that you "delete" without overwriting. The problem is that many users are unaware that a modern photocopier even contains a hard drive ... they are probably oblivious of the fact that modern copiers have little in common with the traditional photostatic machines they grew up with, except that they're faster and don't smell as much. Manufacturers need to better educate buyers (or lessees) about the machines they're using, and perhaps make hard drives more accessible so that when they're sold, they can have the drives removed and destroyed first.