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Anyone see the Today Show this morning?

http://www.today.com/video/throwing-out-a-computer-you-might-want-to-take-a-hammer-to-it-first-651401795545

Right at the beginning, the reporter is suggesting that RAM sticks hold data.

Um. Sure. Lol
I can't watch from my phone but here's my initial take without the video.
quick answer. No. Unless your a CIA operative or a Russian spy from 1978 no one is going to go through the extremely expensive process of recovery for John and Jane Doe's chase or BoA account. With a minimal possibility of actually getting anything useful.

Does your ram hold data. 99.9% of the time the answer is no. (Self contained sram with an on card battery is the ONLY exception).

Can I.(meaning me! I, As in with my specialized training in doing so) recover information from a RAM stick, from a desktop computer, from your house...? Sure. But i you and I will both be dead before anything is yielded from it. Dead from old age. Lmao.

In a shield clean room environment using high rate Delta radiation and hydrochloric acid MIST reduction to gradually reduce the actual structure of the memory cells to find possible ghost remnants of charge changes relating to 1s and 0s that may, or more likely may not yield byte chains representing useable data, that is scrambled out of order.
Then run those random possible scrambled byte strings through a matching algorithm to come up with every possible useable combination.
Then sort the [8*2]•n (n = number of cells) random 1/0 flips into workable binary instructions and divulge pare handles that equate to real world information. The organize those random results into a dictionary database for a brute force comparison of binary relationships that equate to words (or account codes).
And finally put those results in a useable order for real information.

So uh, sure. There may be data there. But no person on earth is going after it.

A whole lot easier to break into your house, shoot you in the head, and copy your hard drive. To be brutally frank.

Btw. Modern high grade ram cells hold a charge for about a half dozen hours or so before total degradation sets in and electrons begin to leak. So if that video shows some sort of actual recovery they would be using fresh material for the source just after pulling it from a powered unit.

Basically, the video is "How to prevent data theft from your resold or recycled computer for dummies" (by dummies).

They mention that there is free software out there for data recovery, but fail to mention that there also free software to wipe data.

It is a bit humorous, but, it is already hard enough to explain to the average user that there is no data security issue involved in releasing your RAM, without a national news network showing stuff like that.

Yep. I watched it. What a joke.

Fastest way to safeguard hard disks (and usb, SSDs, phones etc) is a full disk encryption followed by a format.
Every single modern os offers full disk encryption and there are free tools that will even encrypt the boot loader and file directory.

Format wipes the key. No recovery. Period.
This is a sad example of fear news. Nothing more.

Stories like this are why people drill out hard drives. Hey stupid you leaving behind bit dust that makes recycling that much harder. Oh, and drilling your disk does NOT stop me from recovering your data, in less than an hour. Idiots.