Blog
On Disposing of Computers Properly
I love cleanup days in Sydney, because they're a great opportunity for hoarders like me and my housemates to accumulate massive amounts of junk. There's something really exciting about finding some old piece of hardware in amongst the cassette tapes and cardboard boxes. Naturally for me, the ultimate find on these expeditions is a PC to add to my collection of dinosaurs, so when I spot one I scoop it up fast. Last cleanup day only yeilded one complete PC (although we did manage to collect some exploding power supplies) which seemed unable to POST due to keyboard errors (even with two keyboards attached), but that's not necessariy a bad thing: its always great to have a source for spare parts lying around.
When it came to using the hard drive from the aforementioned dinosaur, I simply couldn't resist the urge to rifle through the contents of it like a grab bag of personal data. Maybe I'm just a sick, voyeristic individual, but its a habit I have regardless. This particular hard drive didn't have anything particularly shocking stored within its little steel shell, except for evidence that its previous owner had used it for a very specific purpose: porn. The aged Windows 98 installation aboard this relic from the past was heaving at the seams with diallers and all manner of spam and other such "free porn xxx" related paraphernalia. It also contained various user account details for match-making websites and the owners dialup account, their contact list and numerous other personally identifying marks.
The whole got me thinking that if you're going to throw out a hard drive, you should probably clear the contents from it. This is the second time in recent months that me and my happy housemate hombres have come into a junk computer with a fair bit of personal materials still left onboard. While we're relatively harmless people, it would be quite possible to garner a lot of personal information from a PC or hard drive which hasn't properly been disposed of (i.e. at least formatted). When you throw out a hard drive, you should probably at least format it to get rid of the personal stuff. I'm not talking military grade data destruction here: just don't leave your full name, dialup account details and around 10 adult-friend-finder accounts sitting on there. Most people seem to be under the misconception that when the computer doesn't boot up, the data is lost forever. It seems to me that perhaps that misconception is a little dangerous; you wouldn't thow out all your old tax papers and letters from the bank in big boxes marked "private" without at least shredding them first, so why not do the same for your computer?
Greg later went on to format the hard drive and use it as the temporary base for his new zombie media centre. No local perverts were harmed in the process.
Link to this article |
Make a Comment
Tags:
Security, Tip, Junk Computer
