‘ Mick Payne remembers the moment the madness of the way we dispose of our data was brought home to him.

The chief operating officer of Techbuyer, an IT asset disposal company in Harrogate, was standing in a large windowless room of a data center in London surrounded by thousands of used hard drives owned by a credit card company. Knowing he could wipe the drives and sell them on, he offered a six-figure sum for all the devices.

The answer was no. Instead, a lorry would be driven up to the site, and the data-storing devices would be dropped inside by authorized security personnel. Then industrial machines would shred them into tiny fragments.

“I walked out and thought, ‘This is absolutely crazy’,” says Payne. “They couldn’t allow the disks to leave the building—despite the fact we could wipe them on-site then sell to a new customer who could make use of them for years to come... It was a complete waste.” ‘


[arstechnica.com]



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/07/2022 04:30AM by btfc.

And the one reason might be
[arstechnica.com]



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/07/2022 01:36AM by pqrst.

Quote
pqrst
And the one reason might be
[arstechnica.com]

Yep. Physical destruction of the drives is quick, easy to document, and does not require as much skills from the persons handling decommissioning them.

The one takeaway from the Arstechnica article is that in the end no personal data appears to have been leaked in this case. The reality is most purchasers of recycled drives like the ones mentioned in the article will just erase them and reinitialize to place in use. After a bit of use there would be no old data easily recovered. This only came to light because one IT person was nosy and looked first.

We shred our used drives for security. That's simply the way it is. At least most of the computer carcasses are sold on though not all and I snag every decent Tower case and loot the RAM (first come first served, I am ofter not first) and when very lucky a video card. Not a lot goes to waste but more than I'd like.