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Texas Plumber Sues Car Dealer After His Truck Ends Up In Videos of Syria's Front Lines (mashable.com)
New submitter hydrodog writes: A Texas plumber traded in his truck, which ended up in ISIS videos showing his logo and phone number. Now he is getting hundreds of harassing phone calls for 'supporting ISIS' and is suing the dealership for not taking off his information before selling it. He is seeking more than $1 million in damages. According to Mashable: "According to the complaint, filed last week, a salesman at the dealership, Edgar Vasquez, told Oberholtzer 'not to worry about the decal,' saying that peeling it off would 'blemish the vehicle paint.' 'At no time did Vasquez or any other agent, servant, or employee of the Defendant tell Plaintiff that Defendant would leave the decals on the truck, which would be transferred in some fashion to international jihadists conducting warfare upon innocents in Syria,' reads the complaint.
When your HDD fails under warranty, most manufacturers just have you send it in and they send you a refurbished drive. Then they go about fixing your drive, and will send that out as a refurbished drive to replace someone else's failed HDD.
I've always wondered - what about the data that was on your failed drive? Do they just do a quick format? A full format? Or do they do a secure erase on the drive (overwrite every sector with zeros) before sending it back out? If the person who receives your old drive manages to recover your data from it, can you sue the HDD manufacturer? If you were selling the HDD, you'd secure erase it yourself before shipping it. But when the drive fails, that usually makes it impossible to do a secure erase on it.
If you have sensitive data on the drive, your only choices seem to be to send it in under warranty and hope the HDD manufacturer acts responsibly and secure erases it. Or to play it safe and destroy the drive, giving up the warranty. It seems like there should be some middle ground between those two extremes.