![]() ![]() Underpinning the reluctance to move away from shredding is the fear that data could leak, triggering fury from customers and huge fines from regulators. Lorne Campbell, Guzelian, and SWEEEP Kuusakoski The trust problem When companies decide they want to upgrade their equipment, which usually happens every three to five years, data storing devices are routinely destroyed in a process like the one Payne described. They sit inside the world’s 23,000 data centers, some of which span floorspace equivalent to dozens of Olympic-sized swimming pools. The servers contain several data-storing devices, each roughly the size of a VCR tape. Instead it is stowed across several of the world’s estimated 70 million servers, each one a steel box about the size of a kitchen sink, made up of all sorts of precious metals, critical minerals, and plastics. Payne had experienced first-hand the ubiquitous industry practice of shredding data-storing devices.Įvery day when you fire off emails, update a Google document, or take a photo, the data generated is not stored in a “cloud” as the metaphor suggests. “They couldn’t allow the disks to leave the building-despite the fact we could wipe them on-site then sell to a new customer who could make use of them for years to come. “I walked out and thought, ‘This is absolutely crazy’,” says Payne. ![]() Then industrial machines would shred them into tiny fragments. Instead, a lorry would be driven up to the site, and the data-storing devices would be dropped inside by authorized security personnel. Knowing he could wipe the drives and sell them on, he offered a six-figure sum for all the devices. The chief operating officer of Techbuyer, an IT asset disposal company in Harrogate, was standing in a large windowless room of a data center in London surrounded by thousands of used hard drives owned by a credit card company. Mick Payne remembers the moment the madness of the way we dispose of our data was brought home to him.
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