Internet Security

A couple questions regarding personal info.

-I sold an old computer that I had reformatted the drive before selling it. If they try to recover the info would they be able to get to old emails or IM's from AOL, Yahoo, Hotmail etc...?

-I had an old Hotmail account which I pretty much forget the adress and everything. Will they delete my emails and personal info off of there servers? I know they do now if you don't log in every so often, but this is a really old one and I didn't know if the rules were different then and the account would stay active?

-I know people can get your email address by searching for your name, but can they get personal info from searching for Yahoo or AOL, etc... ID's?

-some sites like AOL and others after you cancel, they say just log in to reactivate, this means they are keeping personal info on file, even emails. Is there any laws on this to make a site that you cancel from delete your info?

Thanks!

Thanks for taking the time to reply. I know it sounds paranoid, but it's something we should all think about.

When I reformat my drive now I use the Seagate utility and I believe it writes zeros the drive. The computer that I sold a friend did the work on it, he may have done an FDisk, but I thought he said he did something more thorough than that, but I'm not sure, I'm no pro. Does an FDisk or something similar that he might have done write zeros to the drive?

-even if the Yahoo email is on the server, couldn't the password be on the hard drive since I ususally click for the site to "remember me on this computer", so there would be a cookie.

-also for AOL I used the filing cabinet which writes to the hard drive

Thanks

Even so, cookies don't store passwords in plain text, so while it may be possible to restore the cookie and log on to your Yahoo email... it seems unlikely they would go through the effort. It's not exactly like people use Yahoo for sensitive info.

Fdisk won't write zeroes to a hard drive. All it will do is allow you to delete/create partitions. Once a partition is deleted, all data on that partition is lost. Once the partition is re-created, it has to be formatted again to be usable. Generally this is enough to keep casual snoopers at bay. It would take someone that knows what they're doing with the right kind of software to get anything usuable off the drive.

<font color=red> If you design software that is fool-proof, only a fool will want to use it. </font color=red>