Dave Winer’s Hard Drive
But this, too, is stupid. If your drive has sensitive data on it, you don't let them take it in the back room without your presence. Sure, we don't expect Apple or anyone else to go copying your hard drive when it's in for a service call, but a Consumerist investigation six months ago caught Geek Squad technicians doing exactly that, at least for porn. Both Geek Squad and Apple have policies against this, but Apple has no magic psychic employee screening that would prevent bad apples (no pun intended) from slipping through.
Coincidentally, a friend called me just a few days ago asking how to do a secure erase of his MacBook Pro’s drive. He’d just had an Apple Store look at it, they’d taken it to the back room for a while, and he’d decided that was a mistake. Next time: make a couple backups and erase the drive first.
2 Comments RSS · Twitter
A lot of people don't seem to realize that Disk Utility has a "wipe" mode:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=303462
There's also a "free space" option, so after you do your back up, you delete all the sensitive data and then do a wipe so that it's unrecoverable:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=DiskUtility/10.5/en/duh1010.html
