Wild card

Dear Laura who presumably lives in Fayetteville,

I’ve got your 4GB microSD card if you want it. You forgot to remove it when you returned a Sylvania Android tablet to Hastings in Fayetteville. (My wife, in what can best be described as a long-simmering fit of envy over my tablet, bought one of her own today.)

For whatever it’s worth, you forgot to use the “factory reset” option to wipe all your private data from the device. I realized this when I saw that the tablet was already localized to Fayetteville, and then went to add my wi-fi router to the “approved” wi-fi points on the tablet and saw that there were a lot of other wi-fi points already “approved”. Just for laughs I decided to see if whoever returned the tablet without wiping it had left an SD card in the slot. Yep, you did. Man, I’d be pissed if I did that – even if I didn’t want the tablet anymore (really, it’s kind of a neat little gadget if you’re not expecting it to be an iPad – you should’ve given it a chance), I would’ve been able to use the card for something else like my phone. My wife got an 8GB microSD to go in the tablet; she doesn’t need the one you or your folks paid hard-earned money for.

What’s more, I didn’t look at anything that you had on the card or the tablet. I simply wasn’t interested. I wiped the device memory and put the card away in a little microSD case. I’d hope that anyone else in this situation would do the same thing, but I think we all know that’s not too likely. I’m one of the good guys.

If you want the thing back, let me know. Seriously. I’ll mail it to you.

You’ve got to be careful about this stuff, folks. Despite doing the right thing and not looking at anything more sensitive than the machine settings, I already know that Laura in Fayetteville owned this. If I’d looked at the SD card, I bet I could find out all kinds of things. But I’m the kind of dweeb who averts his eyes when someone’s typing their password or punching in their PIN. If you don’t take the security of your private info seriously, how do you expect the next guy to, no matter how well-intentioned the next guy may be?

In the meantime, Mrs. Green is really enjoying Laura’s Android tablet. 😆