Net Zeros and Ones

Introduction

It has been 27 years since Kim Väisänen and his partner, both in Finland, purchased a hard drive online from a local medical center and discovered thousands of patient records on it. They sent their findings to a journalist who exposed the data leak. The two went on to create one of the first commercial services to reliably erase data from storage devices. Yet, even today, there are very large organizations that get caught disposing of storage media with little concern for the data that resides on them. Or, if they acknowledge the problem, they negligently send the hard drives to be physically shredded in special machines, missing out on the opportunity to do the right thing for both their bottom line and the environment.

In October 2022, ArsTechnica reported the following:

“Last month, the US Securities and Exchange Commission fined Morgan Stanley $35 million for an “astonishing” failure to protect customer data, after the bank's decommissioned servers and hard drives were sold on without being properly wiped by an inexperienced company it had contracted.”

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/10/why-big-tech-shreds-millions-of-storage-devices-it-could-reuse

There are more than 20,000 data centers around the world today. Many of them upgrade the storage media they use every three to five years as they wear out or as greater speeds and densities are introduced into new models. While many have data sanitization polices in place to completely wipe ...