It should be policy for the rental company to do this. On more than one occasion, I have received a car with a previous renter's personal data still in the system.
When I am out of town, I sometimes print at copy shops.
You'd be amazed what kind of PDFs are left open in Acrobat, just because people are too lazy to close the application. I have seen contracts, bank account statements, residency permits, letters of incorporation, private messages logs, ....
All without doing any digging, I just get assigned a computer for printing, turn on the screen, and it's there.
"You'd be amazed what kind of PDFs are left open in Acrobat,"
Observation tells us it's a lost cause to teach people about privacy/security of this type and have the large majority of people observe prudent ways of preventing their data from leaking. We've known about this since before the internet when people would chuck old documents in the garbage under the assumption no one would ever bother to go through their trash digging for information. But, we've learned from police, private investigators and espionage accounts that huge amounts of data can be extracted from trash simply because people aren't careful.
We also know there's always been a small percentage of people who have been careful, they're the ones who never throw out old accounts, letters, envelopes or even notes with phone numbers on them into the trash but they're so small in numbers that those who are scrounging for information know that the majority of their pickings will be successful.
The only effective way around this is to build systems that automatically obfuscate data from anyone but their owner. As we know, this is easier said than done.
I wholly agree with your sentiment, but as someone who cares to actually take action for my privacy this kind of onerousness is par for the course, unfortunately.
You're right, but it's the world we live in, and we need to exist within the system. This is the best way to do it - and spread the knowledge among your social circles.