Every year millions of Americans throw away or sell their old computers. But did they adequately delete their personal information from their hard drive?

In most cases people try to delete their pictures or videos or documents from their hard drive but studies indicate they often don't.

To check to see how much people really are deleting from their computer an investigation was conducted. Four computers were bought at random from a local pawn shop and taken to computer expert John Mayovsky, owner of Spokane Computing.

The goal was to see if he could find private information on these computers.

"People seem to have a false sense of security. They put it in the recycle bin, empty the bin and think they're safe," Mayovsky said.

But that doesn't cut it. It only took John a short while to find content previous owners probably thought they deleted from their computers but didn?t. Within minutes of looking at the first of the four computers John started finding private information. He found family pictures, videos, and web history.

"We found everything from family pictures to instant messages conversations, to online casino logs, to risqué pictures and movies," Mayovsky said.

It continued to get worse as he went through each of the four computers and found more and more disturbing information. On one computer there was pornographic videos and pictures from some sort of bachelor party, e-mail addresses and instant messages that contained full names and personal information in them. There were documents that appeared to be financial in nature and lists of financial websites.

On another computer John found eight subscriptions to online gambling sites including usernames of all of the gamblers.

"If we have his username for online gambling he would likely use the same one for bank account information, email, and remote work access," Mayovsky said.

But it doesn?t stop there. John could see when and how long the gambling took place, the amounts they were gambling with and how much money was won or lost.

These gambling sessions took place years ago but John Mayovsky was still able to pull the data off the hard drives.

Mixed in among images, web histories, documents, usernames and passwords were some homemade videos of young teenage girls talking about their sexual exploits in which they talked about boys they had been with, mentioning them by name and then they wondered how bad it would be if someone actually saw this videotape they were making.

"Everything we found is deleted items our recovery programs were able to find and recover," Mayovsky said.

All the usernames, passwords, pictures and documents and web browsing history was still on computers sold to pawn shops by owners who did so probably thinking they had deleted everything they needed to delete. So, the big question is this: what do you do to clean your hard drive so someone can't find your information once you sell your computer?

John Mayovsky says the best thing to do is to physically destroy the hard drive. Drill holes in it, hit with a hammer, anything. But then of course you can't sell your computer.

If you are looking to sell your computer John says there are online programs that you can download for free that will shred items discarded from the recycle bin. One of those downloads is called Eraser and is available for free online.

"You need to take some basic steps to prevent someone with basic tools from being able to go in and recover data without you knowing," John said.