Sun, 05 Jan 2020 20:11:33 +0100
private

Painful Privacy

As an avid fighter and one of the last two people on earth believing in privacy, I tend to always go the extra mile to protect my sensitive data from preying eyes. Quite often to the amusement and mocks of family, friends and colleagues alike.

When that nasty harddrive failed on me, I was not too worried as I had backup galore. However, this hd had now turned into something of little value. Environmentally senstive as I am, I obviously wanted to feed the piece into recycling to allow new little harddrives being built from it.

However, I did not want to take the risk of a skillful hacker recovering what I had no access to any longer.

Oh yes. I had encrypted the data. I always do. But, how good was that in times of emerging nano computing?

Not only are there numerous stories of geeks recovering data from harddrives sold on ebay and the likes. There are also countless reports of sensitive data recovered from storage found on dumps. I would not fall victim to inadvertly disclosing stuff that was not meant to be disclosed.

Long story short. I took the drive, went to our garden shed, took that pickaxe, a cardbox and went to our backyard to do my destructive work. Making sure that nobody on the planet can find anything useful on that hd with reasonable effort.

This is the story. Watch from beginning:

Ibuprofen

Novalgin

Aspirin

Norflex

VtaminB12

Magnesium

Sauna

Cut a long story short. This excercise turned out to be a painful one. A wrong move and my data deletion effort turned into a stoppover at my orthopaedist who connected me to a cocktail of chemicals in order to get my lumbar spine going again.

Lesson learnt:
Don't use a pickaxe where a strong magnet can do a better job.