The Department of Natural Resources is encouraging people to recycle old computers — but before you do, it’s important to take it to a collection site that’s DNR-certified and will shred your hard drive.
“There’s many people that will recycle this. They’re not all certified by the DNR. They’re not all legitimate in terms of what they’re going to do with hard drives,” said Jim Overly, the owner of Cyber Works.
Collection sites certified by the DNR, like Cyber Works in Green Bay, meet certain requirements, including disposing of hard drives properly by shredding them.
“Computers have a lot of sensitive data on it. You want to make sure those hard drives are completely shredded, meaning that they actually get ground up,” Overly said.
It’s important to shred your hard drive because even though it’s not online any more, cyber thieves can still get hold of your personal information.
“Once your computer is done, a lot people think, ‘Well, now I’m not on the Internet, it’s safe.’ All that data can be recovered. Even if you delete it, it can still be recovered off of a hard drive. Destroying the hard drive is the only way to ensure your data is safe,” Overly said.
So even if you deleted things like email, credit card information, and bank records, skilled cyber criminals can still retrieve that information if they get access to that hard drive.
“You can use all that information to impersonate someone, open a new bank account under their name, they can use credit card numbers online to order things.”
DNR-certified collection sites will guarantee that hard drives are shredded so sensitive information stays out of the wrong hands.
