It's a bit like when a building inspector condemns a building or rezones a property. In order to restore that document, all one would have to do is ignore that label stating that it's "free" space. The only difference is that your system has marked it as "free" space, meaning other programs are free to overwrite that sector if they need the disk space. But more importantly, the information still physically exists on your hard drive right where it was before. For one, there could be dozens of previous versions of it still floating around in caches and temporary folders. For conventional hard drives, when you "delete" this data, it never really gets deleted. There are literally years worth of information still lingering throughout your system, including login information, passwords, photos, web browsing history - you name it. But the problem is that no one ever bothers to do so. When the memos have served their purpose, they must be shredded off. All these residual files are like confidential internal memos at a corporation - they are never meant to see the light of day outside the office walls, but in order for the different departments to work together, sensitive information has to be printed off, copied and circulated. In order to perform system functions, launch programs, edit files and visit websites, your computer is constantly logging your activity, creating temporary copies of documents and saving cached versions of webpages on your hard drive. This isn't some evil conspiracy hatched by Microsoft (Macs and Linux computers do it too). This is a problem even for SSD devices - they purge deleted files themselves, but file names, which may contain some sensitive information, may remain for a long time.
That's because virtually every piece of information that has ever passed through your machine is locked somewhere within, regardless of whether you deleted it or if it was a "temporary" file. In fact, when it comes to protecting your privacy and preventing identity theft, your computer just might be your worst enemy.
"An elephant never forgets," or so they say.
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