Dead hard drives may still tell tales...

This is not surveillance related, but is definitely the cause of a lot of fraud out there, especially identity theft.  Have any of you ever thrown away a computer?  Sent an old PC to a recycling center? Did you erase the contents of the hard drive, I mean really erase them?
Chances are you didn't.  You may have formatted the drive, making it appear as though nothing is on it, or even just sent all the items from the drive into the Recycling Bin and then dumped it.  Sadly, this doesn't really erase anything.
Some fraudsters out there are pretty clever.  They will hang out in an alley and steal the hard drives from computers in a dumpster near a business that is retooling or upgrading.  There are some electronics recycling center employees who are willing to grab a hard drive here and there, especially one that comes from a computer that was top-of-the-line when it came out.  There are even quite a few people lurking around on Craigslist hoping that you will sell them your outdated computer cheap, so they can harvest your personal info.  This is not a joke.

When you delete something from your hard drive, you don't really get rid of it.  You are simply telling the computer that it is OK to overwrite the information that is stored in that particular area.  So the computer changes the first character of the filename to a little symbol, and then overwrites the file, just as soon as it has something new to put there.  That means, with a little bit of cleverness and a lack of scruples, an enterprising person can retrieve all or part of the information that you think you deleted.  That includes passwords, credit card numbers, SSN's, love letters, cake recipes, whatever.
There is a way to make sure that your hard drive is TOTALLY cleaned up before you sell your computer, or throw it out, or recycle it. There are several different standards for how thoroughly you need to overwrite the data (for example the Pentagon overwrites their data 7 times before considering it beyond retrieval), but some of those methods verge on straight paranoia.  The link below should give you a good idea of how to go about doing it yourself, reasonably.  Stay protected, fraud never sleeps.

http://tinyurl.com/y8napma