'Destroyed' Hard Drive Found At Flea Market

Billosaur writes "From Yahoo News comes this tidbit about a couple who got a very shocking phone call. Henry and Roma Gerbus received a phone call from a man named Ed claiming he had purchased their old hard drive at a flea market. They had previously taken their computer to Best Buy to have the hard drive replaced and were told that the store would destroy it. Now it has turned up at a flea market, still containing their personal information, such as bank account numbers and Social Security numbers. The Gerbus' are a little perplexed and are very worried about identity theft."

Comments

Scandalous!

[ackthpt]

Memo to store managers throughout the country: "Rotate a new batch of minimum-wage slaves into all positions, which demand technical skills and adherence to moral and ethical code, post haste!"

Gad! Whatever could motivate people who are compensated so well to scrap computers and sell parts at a flea market? I shall have to dwell further upon this great paradox this weekend at my summer cottage in the Hamptons.

Re:Scandalous!

[zuzulo]

As a public service, links to three excellent, free, software based HDD wiping utilities. The first is even open source ...

Darik's Boot and Nuke
Active Kill Disk
PC Inspector

There should never be an excuse for selling or transfering ownership of a hard drive with pre-existing data when there are fast, free, and convienient utilities that can effectively remove all data without damaging HDD functionality. Physical destruction is of course, the most secure method of permanently wiping data, but for most folks good software based data destruction should be more than sufficient.

Obligatory disclaimer: I am in no way associated with any of the above products except as a satisfied user.

Re:Scandalous!

[ackthpt]

What could motivate them to sell it is one thiing, but what motivated them to sell it with the data on is surely harder to explain.

You're assuming Best Buy sells off this scrap. In reality they should be turning it over to a disposal company (which, in theory, could sell the parts at flea market if not the most upstanding of ethical standards are adhered to.) But as the drive should have had Holes Drilled In it smells more like the monkey in charge of that job at BB chose not to, which strongly suggests it was they who pawned the drive, not corporate masters.

Of course in a moment of doubt, always lean towards the simplest answer: the guy who did it was a really stupid mofo.

Stupid, certainly. Unethical, most definitely. He or she should be sacked and then turned over to authorities for prosecution on theft, sale of stolen property, etc.

As if though it matters...

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone that is taking a PC to Best Buy for a HDD replacement is probably sending money to Prince Abul Smith of Nigeria anyways.

Destroy it yourself

[crummyname]

If the information on the hard drive was so sensitive, why didn't the couple destroy it themselves? Even if Best Buy did destroy it, an employee would have had access to it anyway before its destruction. That's a security risk either way.

Re:Destroy it yourself

[ackthpt]

If the information on the hard drive was so sensitive, why didn't the couple destroy it themselves? Even if Best Buy did destroy it, an employee would have had access to it anyway before its destruction. That's a security risk either way.

It's called: "Misplaced Trust in Corporate America"

Why, just look at these words which follow, meant to calm and sooth the worried customer:

"Our company values and places the utmost importance on maintaining the privacy of our customers. We will fully investigate these allegations."

They no doubt came from some tome of boilerplate Corporate Communications and Public Relations.

The real translation behind the scenes is doubtless anything less than a fast call to the law firm Best Buy retains to see how much they could be sued for and another call to the PR department to get the above phrase looked up in the Table of Contents and issued to media outlets. Meanwhile in the board room the executives are probably all bent over, like a circular conga-line holding covers over the arses of those in front of them.

Re:Destroy it yourself

[sysadmn]

It's not at all unlikely they took a "broken" computer into Best Buy. Best Buy told them it was the hard drive (meaning it almost surely wasn't the hard drive), and replaced it for them. They asked about the old one, and were assured it would be destroyed. Would you have asked to take it home before reading this story?

Re:SSN?

[Detritus]

Someone who has electronic account statements from their bank and/or brokerage.

Re:SSN?

[plams]

I had, but luckily it got mf2lro8sw03ufvnsq034jfowr18f3cszc20vmw'd.

Why

[User 956]

Why would you pay a store to destroy something like a hard drive? Destroying it *yourself* is clearly way more fun.

Re:SSN?

[nuOpus]

Ahhhh now this is by far the dumbest comment I have heard. Is he joking? Or does he not know that personal computers as well as business computers are used to assist users in managing things like oh ... taxes, perform banking, store financial records, act as an archive for scanned documents, so on and so forth.

Or ... does this person think computers are used purely for playing games and watching a blue and red bar move as you defrag a hard drive? Or maybe people play games with folders to see how straight they can make the icons?

In my world, computers are used for far more than entertainment, toys and gimmicks. It is a way for people to manage their day to day lives, simplify complex tasks or just act as a way to get away from a paper based society. Well, they can play games just as easy too, but you get the point.

Hard drives are often a wealth of private information and it is up to the person disposing of it to ensure that it cannot be read.

And to the people getting ready to reply with "well that is the problem with computers" or "never keep personal information on a HD". It is akin to countless people (yes there are many) throwing documents like credit card bills or ANY paper information with private information in the trash. Ultimately it is up to the person to ensure he/she SHREDS the documents FIRST before trashing. This is no different than electronic media.

Former Employee....

[jangell]

As a former BestBuy/GeekSquad employee I can tell you that the company procedure was: 1.) Drill holes in hard drive. 2.) Send Computer to Best Buy Service Center to be discarded. When a customer would bring a computer in to be recycled I would open the cover with them standing there. I'd remove the hard drive and take a drill and put multiple 1/4 inch holes through the hard drive. I'd have the customer watch me do this and drill until they were happy. After that I would put the hard drive back into the computer and send it to a service center. 90% of your GeekSquad/BestBuy Employees have no idea what they are doing. They are also only getting paid $10 / hr. Don't expect much. There are one or two in each store that generally know more then you'd expect. But they are also only getting paid $10 / hr. If you want great service, It helps to have boobs. I'm not joking.

Not the couple's fault

[itunes keith]

I do not think this is the couple's fault at all. Best Buy supposedly was serviced to erase/destroy the hard drive. In a perfect world, people would take care of destroying their own data. Apparently, in this case, the couple seemingly didn't know how, so they hired Best Buy to take care of this - which is (usually) the next most responsible choice.

Re:A question of time

[swv3752]

So you are actually suggesting people open the hard drive and run a rare earth magnetic over the platters? Because anything short of an MRI is going to do jack squat to a modern hard drive. I have dropped a 1" cube nneodymiun magnet on a hard drive and it did nothing.

I have had friends try erasing hard drives with a bulk tape eraser. One failed to spin up. The other two would boot up fine and still had all thier data.

I think your last comment is way off base

[rsilvergun]

probably 80% of /. users have boobs, and we _still_ get lousy service!

Geek Squad

[amattas]

I actually used to work for the geeksquad and there was a lot of problems there, so I will list them. 1. Employees took parts from computers we threw out home, including hard drives, and the managers really didn't care. 2. Employees copied customers files from their computers onto the store computers (aka, found porn on the customers computers, often of customers or of the people they knew and kept it). 3. Employees often didn't fix problems completely because they thought it was too much work. 4. And to top it off, I often found managers browsing through the files that the employees kept and thought it was the coolest thing in the world.