Disposing of your old technology

I was listening to NPR the other day and heard this great piece on what really happens to electronic waste.

After Dump, What Happens To Electronic Waste?

Besides the very important issues with poisoning people across the globe (China, India, Ghana, Pakistan), it makes a point about data on discarded Hard Drives.


This is a quote from the transcript of the show:

Mr. PUCKETT: Absolutely. And, in fact, when we went to Nigeria in 2005 -we did a similar expose in Nigeria called "The Digital Dump" - we gathered up hard drives at that time, and we had them examined forensically by an outfit in Switzerland who very easily was able to go in and get all of the data off of those hard drives.
And we found amazing things. We found a hard drive from the World Bank with all of the internal documents. We found a hard drive from Wisconsin Child Protective Custody Services with all the private data about the children that were in private custody - just amazing information that should have been kept absolutely private, because in the wrong hands, you can have identity theft. You can have blackmail. 

The lesson here, is to wipe your hard drive of all of it's data prior to disposing of it.  Even if your computer is not usable, the data on the hard drive should still be wiped.  In most cases, the information on the hard drive of a non-working computer can be retrieved.


Elite Networking And Consulting Can help with this.