A guy sells MacBooks on eBay, and here is the email he sent me regarding my questions. The part that I do not understand is in bold.
That is what I do for this business is sell used macbooks. We buy these in large quantities and wipe them, load new operating system and sell them. The battery is good, this unit does have some imperfections that we have either pictured or described in the listing. Please read entire listing to make sure you know what you are buying. As for shipping it is @ 70.00 shipping to you.
Does "wipe" mean "to refurbish"?
Best Answer
It could mean that the data is erased, or it could imply a more thorough erasure.
The Hacking Lexicon mentions:
So the true meaning of wipe in the text that you cite might depend on who wrote the sentence – was it authored by a marketer, or a technician? A marketer might use the word wipe even if the company only performs a simple erasure of data on the refurbished hard drives, implying some of the old data could still be read with some sophisticated retrieval techniques. (Or sometimes files just get left on inadvertently.) However, perhaps the company is more careful than that, and the data is meticulously overwritten with 1's and 0's multiple times to prevent any of it from being readable again, even through computer forensics.