Why you Should Securely Recycle your Electronic Devices

Pretty much everyone uses computers in today’s day and age, whether it’s for work, school, or just surfing the internet to find information at home — not only computers but mobile phones as well. What you don’t often think about is all of the sensitive information that is contained within computers. When it comes to businesses, it is pretty sure that company computers and laptops will provide private and confidential information that is not for prying eyes. You may think that merely deleting files off of these computers are enough, but you would be sorely mistaken.

If you are getting ready to discard an old computer that has private information, there is no doubt that the first thing you will consider doing to remove old information is erasing the hard drive. While it sounds promising, this is not an effective way to remove information from a computer. Grad students at MIT sought to point this out with an experiment. They decided to gather 158 used disk drives that had had data erased. Of the 158 disks they purchased, 129 were usable. Of those 129, 29 still had information on it or else made no real attempt to erase data properly. One one of the disks, they even found 5,000 credit numbers. About 60% of the drives were formatted. However, this does not fully erase the data, and it can still be retrieved. They were amazed at how people do not take steps to fully erase data in a way that it cannot be recovered.

Now that you understand how easy it is to retrieve data from computers even after you have “erased” the drive, it’s time to look into methods that will work. It’s essential to choose an authorized data destruction company if you are looking to have your data completely removed. This will also prevent any data from being able to be retrieved in the future. Also, if you are looking for your computers to be destroyed and recycled, places that securely recycle electronics like WC Recycler will also be able to provide this service for you. Visit the WC Recycler site and fill out a data destruction quote form today!