I confess that I am the kind of 'criminal' (opportunist) that understands how important your laptop and its contents within are to you.
So I've gotten my hands on dozens of laptops over the years from many many places. Schools, coffee shops, airports you name it. All under the radar and never detected.
I find all kinds of information from highly sensitive to straight nudes.
I understand how important these peoples laptops are to them and I don't know why I do it, but every 90% of every laptop i've taken i've had a way to get people their 'contents' back. I feel the need to purchase external HDs for them and back up all their information, photos, EVERYTHING. Once that's done I can usually find information on them and if not them someone they know. Via their cookies, browsing history, saved data, facebooks, etc.
So yeah. I don't know why I do, but I always send my 'victim' an external HD with all their content saved to it. Sometimes encrypted with true crypt and I leave them a little note in an unlocked .txt. with a pass and a I'm sorry but here's your data.
Oh and if you're still reading, please learn to safe guard your laptop and the information within. A start would be using Truecrypt with a 55+ char. password. Same one repeated if need be. but include special characters.
anyways, any thoughts on me returning all data minus the hardware? I think its nice and no I don't do it because I feel guilty. But like I said im sure their content is important to them as mine is to me.
