Published May 9, 2026, 12:00 PM EDT Rob LeFebvre is an editor and writer focusing on consumer and enterprise technologies for a broad range of outlets. He’s been writing online for more than 15 years; before that he was a special educator for kids with severe disabilities. Rob has been an Editorial Director at Lifewire, a news writer at Engadget, and a senior contributor at Cult of Mac. He's written about PCs, Macs, mobile phones, and games, created newsrooms from the ground up, and has extensive experience reviewing hardware, software, and games across his career.  If you've ever deleted a sensitive file on your SSD and assumed TRIM handled deleting it securely, you'd be in good company. The idea that modern solid-state drives erase deleted data in the background is conventional wisdom and not really wrong. The problem is that TRIM isn't built to protect your privacy, but rather to protect your drive's write speeds. Those are pretty different things, and that can matter in some circumstances.…