Keeping your confidential data private

Many digital devices, from computer hard drives to camera cards, contain data files of a highly personal or confidential nature. Businesses and consumers alike are rightly concerned with keeping their private information secure when it’s time to recycle their devices.

The eZcycle program helps to make e-waste recycling safe and secure with:

• Theft-proof e-waste recycling bins
• 24-hour surveillance of the eZcycle depot
• Complete destruction of hard drives and memory cards through the recycling process

Recycling with eZcycle does not allow for refurbishment or resale of your old devices.

Clean Your Memory!

As recommended by the Ontario Electronic Stewardship program, eZcycle advises its users to wipe all personal information from their devices before recycling. Following are a few suggestions to consider before you bring your e-waste to eZcycle.

New life for hard drives?

When you replace a computer, you may find that reusing the hard drive is a better choice than recycling. With a low-cost enclosure or “dongle”, your old hard drive can be converted into an external storage or back-up device. Then your old data stays in your possession, too!

ReFormat

All computers and many other devices include a formatting utility to clean the media for re-use. Reformatting your hard drive or SD card is the simplest way to erase personal data for most basic purposes.

Data Wiping

With the right tools, it’s still possible to recover data from reformatted digital media. However, more advanced methods are available to increase the security of your recycled devices.

• Eraser (https://eraser.heidi.ie/) is a free, open source program for Windows-based systems that will overwrite your hard drive or SD Card several times to destroy some or all data files.
• SIM Manager (https://www.dekart.com/) is a software utility for the SIM cards from cell phones and smart phones that allows you to use a card reader to edit or erase data.