Comment by wrs
1 day ago
This certainly applies to office printers. Printers that accept new jobs while printing have to store them somewhere. There have been many incidents of finding old documents on disposed printers because it doesn’t occur to anyone to wipe them first. This especially applies to “copiers”, because a copier is just a printer in the same box as a scanner.
But that wasn't an office printer. Yes, printers do have some memory to store what they need to print, but surely I didn't expect a document to linger there for weeks. Anyway, you're right: we may have to look at printers differently.
There was a conspiracy theory that China was buying old office printers/scanners hoping to recover secret documents remaining in the cache. Plausible, but seems like a lot of effort hoping for a diamond in the rough when I expect 99% of prints are boring day-to-day information.