Local gov't hard drives with personal info sold in online auction

In medical and financial institutions I worked for, and even for my personal hard drives, we used physical destruction - a large hydraulic metal shear, used twice - such that each hard drive was cut into quarters. And then those pieces were returned for inspection/confirmation prior to being scrapped for metal recycle. This is not rocket science.

I always destroy hard drives physically before getting rid of them. Some of them are pretty well built - they're not easy to destroy!

I know that the drives held information from the Kanagawa prefectural gov't, but I can't see how they are to blame at all in this case. They leased the drives with Fujitsu, who swapped them out for new ones and had a contract with Broadlink to destroy them. Both Fujitsu and Broadlink are liable, and should be sued. The man who took the drives arrested and jailed. He knew exactly what he was doing.

So its more incompetence by incapable people or organisations , now lots of peoples information is disclosed.

Those careless people responsible must be held accountable and punished, this is unacceptable.

In medical and financial institutions I worked for, and even for my personal hard drives, we used physical destruction - a large hydraulic metal shear,

Not many of us have large hydraulic metal shears laying around. I use a hammer and screwdriver, and I'm still not convince they are completely destroyed. Hard drives are tough little buggers.

I would have honestly believed government hard drives were destroyed onsite. I don't know Japanese rules, but most companies hired to do this in the US must destroy them onsite

when they will enforce cashless, one day,

they will say that all your money has disappeared due to hard disk failure or electricity disaster.

this story happened before with citizen pensions...

be aware.

The fact that Fujitsu can continue to dominate in Japan IT industry is amazing.

They lost many clinical trial data just few years prior.

I guess those seitais must pay for something.

What else is new ???.

If it's the old magnetic style hard discs, can't they just run the erase head over and be done? I know they erased it but it goes so fast that it seems like the device does a half asked erase job. No amount of recovery could bring back my mixed tape my brother recorded over. Don't make magnetic tape/discs like they used to.

Maybe linear recording/erasing is more secure than random access recording/erasing.

Indigo:

"when they will enforce cashless, one day, they will say that all your money has disappeared due to hard disk failure or electricity disaster."

I would say use personal magnetic cards (like gift cards) where the data is kept on the magnetic strip of the card. It can still fail (especially the cheaper ones), but they just fail. No personal data is recorded on it. Just the card code and the remaining amount.