The revealing nature of used hard drives
Bill Kerridge is a pub owner who runs an award-winning pub in North Shields, northern England, and whose daughter is a talented gymnast.
Normally, Kerridge would be happy for the readers of a national newspaper to know those details, but this time he was not, because along with a wealth of other information relating to his family, the data was recovered from a computer hard drive bought over the Internet via eBay that the Kerridges knew nothing about.
The news that such personal information about his family holidays, his eldest daughter's training regime and details of his business had been recovered as part of an investigation by British Telecom (BT), data destruction specialists Life Cycle Services and researchers at Glamorgan University has shocked Kerridge.
Richard Martin, 53, was another individual who felt the same way. A hard drive from a personal computer that he had thought he had disposed of properly yielded highly personal letters relating to his financial affairs, including details of bank accounts and insurance claims.
