Staples should pay customers to wipe data

When you want people to do something for you that is tedious and just altogether easier to skip, nothing works better than cold, hard cash.

Staples Inc. should consider paying its customers to effectively wipe their data off of storage devices they are returning to the retailer. The payment could come in the form of a credit towards the replacement storage device they buy, or just a cash refund that is a small percentage of the overall purchase. But why would Staples want to do this, you ask?

After this, Staples agreed to conduct its wipe and restore procedure on any returned computer. But it excused computers that are certified in writing by the customer as having no personal, confidential, or sensitive information stored. As one commenter in our story mentioned , many Staples locations now has customers sign a form stating there is no personal data left on the memory products they return.

But the federal Privacy Commissioner’s audit shows this practice has failed to prevent the problem. That means that either customers are signing the form without really wiping their memory clean (either because they don’t bother, or don’t understand how to effectively accomplish it) or that Staples isn’t doing an effective wipe and restore procedure on the drives returned to it – or both.

If Staples is serious about relying on its customers to wipe their own data, and not just using the forms as a band-aid solution to remove liability, it should better inform them of how to wipe their drives clean. A simple Web page detailing instructions and recommending some freeware tools could help educate customers. But to actually make them follow through on it, Staples will need to cough up the cash incentive.

Financially, it’s a smart move – Staples would save money by not having to pay employees for the time it takes to wipe and restore a drive . Instead, some of that cash can go back to the customer. I’d also wager a guess that if you’re actually paying your customers to wipe their data, fewer customers will be motivated to file privacy complaints.

Wipe Your Hard Drive Clean - Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter

If you tell Windows to delete all your personal information, then give the computer to someone else, the recipient can use any of a number of utilities that perform "unerase" commands. That person can recover much of your personal information within a few seconds. That includes your checkbook register, your credit card information, last year's tax return, or any other information you had on that computer. This "brute force" method certainly will destroy your old data but it seriously affects the resale value of the computer! In reality, there is no need to physically destroy the hard drive. You can destroy its contents much more easily through electronic means. By doing so, the hard drive and the entire computer can be restored to its original factory configuration and safely given or sold to someone else. For years, many people have reformatted their hard drives and re-installed Windows before selling or giving away a PC. Indeed, this does make it difficult for anyone to later retrieve data from the computer but security experts tell us that even reformatting leaves behind some information. A reformat is not guaranteed to delete your personal information from the hard drive. A safer solution is to first wipe the hard drive clean, and THEN to reformat and install a fresh copy of Windows. Darik's Boot and Nuke (DBAN) is a free program that will wipe all data off a drive by rewriting new records on every sector of the disk. DBAN does not rely on Windows' anemic erase command. Instead, it writes new data all over the disk, replacing every bit and byte that was on the drive previously. If that is not enough protection for you, DBAN will even fill up the disk with new records multiple times, writing different information each time. Each new record contains "dummy information" and it completely replaces whatever file was in that space on the hard drive. The end result is worthwhile if you believe that someone else will be using the computer in the future. When I say that DBAN "will wipe all data off a drive," I mean exactly that: ALL data. It removes your personal data as well as the Windows operating system and everything else that is on the hard drive. Once DBAN finishes, you will not be able to boot the computer. In order to use the computer again, you will need to have a CD of Windows or Linux to load onto it. You also can specify how many "passes" should be made on your hard drive.

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