Guarding privacy with donated computers

Organisations and individuals may have some concerns relating to protecting privacy. To assist with this we have developed a process for processing all donated computers.

Students have participated and responded very responsibly to making improvements to this process.

When donated computers arrive for the recycle scheme we

• store them until our next lesson
• boot them to BIOS to determine specifications
• If the hard drive is of a useful size we use a program to over write the data on the disk.
• If the hard drive is not of a useful size we remove the hard drive and physically drill a hole through it to render it useless

Thanks to one of our students for doing the research to find a program for erasing hard disks.
The program that we use to over write the data on the disk is "Active@ KillDisk FREE version"

http://www.killdisk.com/features.htm

We welcome feedback to make this process better.