Boy, doesn't this fill you with confidence?
A year ago, Henry and Roma Gerbus took their computer to Best Buy in Springfield Township to have its hard drive replaced.Henry Gerbus said Best Buy assured him the computer's old hard drive -- loaded with personal information -- would be destroyed. "They said rest assured. They drill holes in it so it's useless," said Gerbus.
A few months ago, Gerbus got a phone call from a man in Chicago. "He said, 'My name is Ed. I just bought your hard drive for $25 at a flea market in Chicago,'" said Gerbus. "I thought my world was coming down."
Best Buy promises they will investigate.
(via BoingBoing)
Filed under :: Big Business :: Hi-Tech
Please forgive me if I've mentioned this before - I don't remember - but I have had an experience along this line.
I always grab junk computers. With enough parts, I can assemble them into a good working machine to give to someone who needs it. I found one on the curb waiting for trash man. All it needed was a new power supply and then booted right up.
The computer had a bunch of Disney for kids' software on it, plus a lot of spyware and a virus, plus the guy's Quicken financial files, and rather a lot of p0rn. After unleashing the fury of GDisk on it, the hard drive was totally (milspec) blank and then I installed new OS and software and passed it on to someone else.
How to be sure your data is safe? Remove the hard drive yourself before turning loose of your old computer, (not difficult) and let your kids take it apart. Or lacking kids, just smash it with a hammer.
Yes, that is how we dealt with hard drives at the Flats...several blows with a 10# sledge hammer to make sure that the plattens were all bent to hell was standard proceedure, along with running Fdisk 10 times before hand.
At my current job we have literally boxes (I'd estimate something like 200-300) hard drives waiting to be destroyed. They'll be brought to a metal recycling plant and shredded, with a technician along to be sure that all of the drives get ganked. For what it's worth, that whole "drill through the old hard drive" thing was the official line when I worked for Best Buy too.