You’ve just bought a new computer, your programs are installed and your old data has been transferred over, so what do you do with your old computer now?  Donate it?  Recycle it?  Set it in the garage to be forgotten about?

But what about the data that’s on that hard drive?  Old copies of tax returns, personal medical information, years of emails, pictures.  Is that information you want falling into a stranger’s hands?

What about at your place of business – you’re technology replacement strategy is in full swing and a whole section of business workstations has just been replaced.  Do you plan on donating those workstations?  Or will your IT company take them away to recycle them?

And what about those hard drives and all that proprietary company data?

Almost gives you a chill thinking about all that personal, private, and proprietary information in some else’s hand, doesn’t it?  And if it doesn’t, it should!

• HIPAA allows for fines up to $250,000 and 10 years in prison for each violation of the patient health insurance privacy rules.
• The Gramm-Leach-Biley Act allows penalties up to $100,000 and 5 years in prison per violation by financial institutions.
• The damage to a company’s reputation when a loss of personal customer data has to be disclosed is immeasurable.
• Per the Ponemon Institute’s study “2011 Cost of Data Breach Study United States” a data breach costs $194 per compromised record.

So what steps should you take to prevent a loss of your data.  The first step is to make sure you are absolutely certain all of the data you need has been transferred off your old computer to the new one.  This is a step that might take a day or two, but if you allow it to sit too long, that’s how computers with personal or proprietary data get forgotten about and the data is allowed to remain on the hard drive for someone else to get their hands on.  So make sure you don’t take more than a week to make certain you have everything you need and take the next step to destroy the old data.

Once you’re sure you have everything you need it’s time to destroy that data.  Here you have two choices, take the drive to a professional who will destroy the data or take the drive to a hard drive shredding company, both have a small fee, but either option is well worth the safety and security of your data and your peace of mind to have it done.

Here we’ve only considered data on computer and server hard drives.  For those who own or manage a business you’ll also want to consider the data stored on smartphones and tablets, especially for those who allow employees to access company data or email on either of these, and data stored on copier / scanner / printer hard drives as well.  The last one is not a concern most of us would think of as a possible area for data loss, but in 2010 Affinity Health Plan had to notify more than 400,000 current and former customers that there personal information might have been compromised due to old data found on the hard drive of a previously leased copier.  For more details see the Privacy Rights Clearing House.

Whichever way you decide to go, follow through is the most important part.  Once you’ve taken care of the data on the drive then there are a multitude of companies who take older computer as donations or recycle them.  Often your regular computer company will facilitate that for you after taking care of destroying your hard drive.