Forensic examination lays bare a user’s computer activity. Personal, confidential and privileged communications, sexual misadventure, financial and medical record keeping, proprietary business data and other sensitive information are all exposed.

In the white-picket-fenced places where active data lives, you can tiptoe around privileged and private information; but deleted data hails from the wrong side of the digital tracks, where there are no names, no addresses and no rules.