Don't Throw Out That Pickaxe

American Scofflaw
Never in history has so much information been produced by so many people. We are swamped by electronic data, a tidal wave of gigabytes. Indeed, the world is probably producing more recorded information every second than it did in the entire 19th century.

With so much data - a stream of binary digits that includes everything from your holiday photos to your bank details to every email you and everyone else on Earth has ever written - it is not surprising that some of it often goes missing.

We have all heard of the hapless civil servants who leave laptops and memory sticks containing our personal details on trains or in taxis. But what few people realise is just how easy it is to recover deleted data from old computers - and the implications of this fact.
time: Could it be time to bash up the old computer to save yourself from the Cyber-gangsters?

Because, unfortunately, a growing number of criminals realise this all too well - and an illicit industry has grown up 'mining' data, such as banking passwords and credit card numbers, addresses and details from people's CVs in discarded computers . These details are then sold on to unscrupulous people who can make good use of them.

'People are going to auctions, buying cheap second-hand PCs, ripping out the hard drives and selling them to criminals in Nigeria,' says Steve Whitehead, a computer expert who specialises in the safe storage and destruction of computer files.

This month, consumer magazine Which? Computing reports that it managed to recover 22,000 'deleted' files from eight computers it bought on eBay.

One Which? reader, Alexander Skipworth, was emailed by a crook from Latvia who had gained access to his old hard-drive; he had obtained from it not only Mr Skipworth's email address, but also his bank and mortgage details.

He emailed a personal photograph contained on the disk as proof and demanded money with menaces.

Mr Skipworth had, wrongly, been told the drive was erased after it was replaced by the computer manufacturer.
can access all sorts of information from your old computer - from bank details to every e-mail you have ever sent

As we trust more and more of our lives to our computers, criminals are having a field day. Think about it: a typical PC hard disk drive - a thin aluminium or glass magnetic-coated platter 31/2in across, which spins at anything up to 10,000 revolutions per minute and which is 'read' by a tiny stylus - can store an extraordinary 200 gigabytes of data.

That means you can store several million photos, whole libraries of books, movies and endless music tracks - not to mention thousands of supposedly private emails and passwords.

Disks of even larger capacity - up to a whopping one terabyte (1,000 gigabytes) - are common; these are enough to record, potentially, just about every conceivable detail of your life and the lives of everyone you know.

Computer disks (and other storage media, such as flash memory sticks) are not only extremely efficient storage devices, but they are also cheap - throwaway cheap.

A few decades ago, this sort of memory storage cost millions of pounds; now you can pay ?50 for a new hard drive with more capacity than Nasa had at its disposal when it first went to the Moon.

Thanks to this, we upgrade our computers regularly - typically every three years. This means that, in Britain, several million old PCs and Macs are thrown away, sold, recycled or donated to charity every year.

Thousands of these machines are simply discarded without any attempt made to delete the files on them. The information on these old computers is freely available to anyone who gets hold of the machine. And even if we make an effort to delete our old files, the chances are they are still there.