Should I or shouldn't I?

I just recently bought an old used laptop at a local donation-based thrift store, and to my surprise it works. Not great, but it works. It had no power cord with it but for 5 bucks it seemed worth the risk of my own power cord not fitting into it, which it did, and I found a fair amount of sensitive information. Some Social Security Numbers, a ton of names phone numbers and account passwords, and a credit card number or two. The majority of this is in a program called CardFile, and I only looked through it because I was blown away that there was that much information left on a donated computer. This gets even better; I noticed when I was cleaning up the outside of it that the serial number sticker has mostly rubbed away except for a few small lines of bar code and little bits of remaining numbers. I just now took my finger and rubbed it and some of the ink came off so I’m not sure if its from being on a lap or what. From what I can gather looking through the computer it was last used really in 2005, and it has a password protection on it but I just click cancel and can get to all this (real protected). Looking though some of the information saved, I found the names’ of the previous owners’ kids, and out of curiosity I looked around on facebook and found one of them. So, to get to the question, should I or should I not send a message to him asking about it?

Answer #1

Yes I most certainly would, I know I would want to know

Answer #2

I’m going to.

Answer #3

It really is the right thing to do

Answer #4

I would delete all the private information, then send a short email to the previous owner warning them that they should PERSONALLY delete that info in the future because someone else could use it for ID theft. Thanks for being honest!!

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