Dataharvest 2026 - the European Investigative Journalism Conference

What can you learn from a discarded laptop? In this session, participants will gather in small groups, and each will receive a laptop. They will have 50 minutes to get as much information as possible from the machines, especially about their past owners. Due to the risks to their (past owners') privacy, a clear code of conduct will be read out at the beginning of the session: no personal information contained in the machines will be photographed or shared at any time.

The session organizers will document the strategies developed by each team to investigate and share the results with all participants. The participants' findings are not shared with the room (for privacy reasons). Besides the fun of satisfying naked curiosity, participants will be able to hone their forensics skills on hardware, develop investigative strategies in large amounts of files, and use OSINT techniques to cross-validate information. They will also have to develop team management skills so as to ensure that all team members have access to the data.

Finally, this session will serve us as a reminder to seriously erase data before disposing of hardware. Please note: in order to attend this session, you need to register. The maximum number of participants is capped at 20.