= Simson Garfinkel
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\b[Simson Garfinkel] researches <computer security>, privacy and <digital forensics>. With <Abhi Shelat>, he studied whether used <hard disk drives> retained readable information after disposal or resale. Their 2003 paper transformed a general concern about <confidentiality> into an investigation of actual storage devices.<Remembrance of Data Passed: A Study of Disk Sanitization Practices by Simson Garfinkel and Abhi Shelat>[Byline, introduction and Our experiment]{ref}
The researchers acquired 158 drives between November 2000 and August 2002, recorded their provenance and examined copied device contents. Some drives were damaged or unreadable; others retained recoverable data. The paper distinguishes ordinary access through a <file system> from information remaining outside its live names and records. It also cautions that the sample does not establish a population-wide prevalence.<Remembrance of Data Passed: A Study of Disk Sanitization Practices by Simson Garfinkel and Abhi Shelat>[Pages24–26, Our experiment, analysis and sampling limitation]{ref}
An original storage example makes the distinction concrete. Suppose a toy <file system> holds a document in four 512-<byte> <file data blocks>. Removing its name from a <file-system directory> and marking those blocks reusable can leave all $4\times512=2048$ content <bytes> unchanged. The <file deletion> changed live bookkeeping, while this stipulated model performed zero overwrites of the document's contents. Other <file systems> can behave differently, but disappearing from a directory listing alone does not prove <data sanitization>.
The experiment motivates testing a storage claim at the level it concerns: absence of a live filename and absence of recoverable former content are different observations.
\Image[https://simson.net/photos/original/2017_Simson_Official_Photo.JPG]
{title=Simson Garfinkel, official portrait linked from his own biography page}
{height=300}
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