RECYCLING AND INDUSTRY NEWS

News on computer recycling:


Digital photocopiers loaded with secrets 
CBS Evening News
April 15, 2010

Nearly every digital copier built since 2002 contains a hard drive that stores an image of every document copied, scanned, or emailed by the machine. If you're in the identity theft business it seems this would be a pot of gold.

This past February, CBS News went to a warehouse in New Jersey to see how hard it would be to buy a used copier loaded with documents. It turns out ... it's pretty easy.

The results were stunning: One of the copiers was from the Buffalo, N.Y., Police Sex Crimes Division and contained detailed domestic violence complaints and a list of wanted sex offenders. On a second machine from the Buffalo Police Narcotics Unit we found a list of targets in a major drug raid.

Another machine from Affinity Health Plan, a New York insurance company, contained 300 pages of individual medical records. They included everything from drug prescriptions, to blood test results, to a cancer diagnosis. A potentially serious breach of federal privacy law.

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Secret U.S. data found on cast-off hard drive
TheStar.com
June 23, 2009

Journalism students say they paid $40 in Ghana for a second-hand hard drive that contained information about multi-million-dollar defense contracts between the Pentagon, U.S. Department of Homeland Security and one of the largest military contractors in the United States.

One of the students said the hard drive was purchased in an open-air market in the coastal town of Tema from a local dealer who bought second-hand hard drives by the cargo load.

The drive contained information about hiring and personnel contracts and plans for U.S. defense agencies and the private military contractor Northrop Grumman, they say. The data on the hard drive included sensitive information about hiring practices, which could help people learn how to get into secured positions at places such as airports. The hard drive also contained information such as credit card numbers and family photos. 

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Recycler dumps toxic electronics around the world
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
May 28, 2009

After tracking hazardous waste shipments and dumping around the world, a national environmental group has sounded the alarm about a million pounds of old electronics innocently donated in Pennsylvania.

Basel Action Network contends that the Western Pennsylvania Humane Society and Allegheny County, Pa., should have known that a free electronics recycling program was too good to be true. The environmental group this week issued a report claiming that EarthEcycle -- which collected more than 1 million pounds of old electronics through the Humane Society's recycling campaign in March and April -- ships hazardous waste to countries where it will most likely end up in toxic dumping grounds.

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Following The Trail Of Toxic E-Waste (video)
60 minutes
November 8, 2008

60 Minutes is going to take you to one of the most toxic places on Earth - a place government officials and gangsters don't want you to see. It's a town in China where you can't breathe the air or drink the water, a town where the blood of the children is laced with lead.

It's worth risking a visit because much of the poison is coming out of the homes, schools and offices of America. This is a story about recycling - about how your best intentions to be green can be channeled into an underground sewer that flows from the United States and into the wasteland.

That wasteland is piled with the burning remains of some of the most expensive, sophisticated stuff that consumers crave. And 60 Minutes and correspondent Scott Pelley discovered that the gangs who run this place wanted to keep it a secret.

WWhat are they hiding? The answer lies in the first law of the digital age: newer is better. In with the next thing, and out with the old TV, phone or computer. All of this becomes obsolete, electronic garbage called "e-waste."

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Are Your Secrets On eBay?
BusinessWeek
November 3, 2008

Too many employees fail to erase or encrypt sensitive data on their mobile devices before tossing them out, say researchers from British phone company BT Group, the University of Glamorgan in Wales, and Edith Cowan University in Australia.

To prove its point, the team recently purchased 161 discarded handheld devices from online auction sites and secondhand outlets in Britain and Australia. One in five, found the researchers, contained details about salaries, company finances, business plans, or board meetings.

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E-Waste: The Dirty Secret of Recycling Electronics
BusinessWeek
October 15, 2008

As the e-waste industry proliferates, it has also become enmeshed in questionable practices that undercut its environmentally friendly image. A recent probe by the U.S. Government Accountability Office found 43 U.S. companies that sought to sell e-waste for export to Asia, in apparent violation of the law. In China and elsewhere, electronic gear commonly is stripped for reusable microchips, copper, and silver; dangerous metals are dumped nearby, often close to farms or sources of drinking water.

The EPA adopted civil rules that went into effect in January 2007 forbidding U.S. companies from exporting monitors and televisions with cathode-ray tubes unless they have approval from the EPA and the receiving country. CRTs electronically project images on screens that are typically made of leaded glass. The gear contains mercury, cadmium, and other toxins that when released carelessly can cause neurological damage in children, among other harmful effects. The blood of children in rural Guiyu, China, a notorious e-waste scavenging site, contained lead at twice the acceptable level set by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, according to a 2007 study conducted by Shantou University.

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Don't recycle 'e-waste' with haste, activists warn
USA Today
July 6, 2008

Consumers saddled with old cellphones, TVs and computers are flocking to electronics recycling events, which have sprung up in more than 1,000 communities over the past four years.

But don't be fooled, activists warn. Items collected at free events are sometimes destined for salvage yards in developing nations, where toxins spill into the water, the air and the lungs of laborers paid a few dollars per day to extract materials. 

E-waste disposal rates are poised to accelerate in the run-up to a nationwide switch to digital television signals in February. Less than 20% of all electronic waste is recycled, according to the EPA. The rest ends up in landfills.

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Data Losses May Spur Lawsuits
eWeek
June 12, 2006

From the nation's largest financial services institutions to the local YMCA, legal and privacy experts maintain that organizations that inadvertently or secretly expose their customers' data will increasingly face legal action. 

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'I just bought your hard drive'
MSNBC
June 5, 2006

One year ago, Hank Gerbus had his hard drive replaced at a Best Buy store in Cincinnati. Six months ago, he received one of the most disturbing phone calls of his life.

"Mr. Gerbus," Gerbus recalls a stranger named Ed telling him. "I just bought your hard drive in Chicago."

Gerbus, a 77-year-old retiree, was alarmed. He knew the old hard drive was loaded with his personal information -- his Social Security number, account numbers and details of his retirement investments. But that's not all. The computer also included data on his wife, Roma, and their children and grandchildren, including some of their Social Security numbers. 

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Computer "recycler" dumps computers on private land
STLtoday
June 3, 2006

When a man with a truck offered to "recycle" a load of old computer monitors in 2001, the University City School District was happy to pay him $5 apiece to be rid of them. So district officials were distressed to learn that some of its equipment has turned up dumped in a once-idyllic place called Echo Valley amid stately cottonwoods and spring daisies.

"When someone tells you they're going to dispose of them properly, you don't expect them to come back and haunt you years later," said Daphne Dorsey, spokeswoman for the district.

"We get statements from recyclers saying they will dispose of them properly. But what they do with them, we don't know. Because all we have is a piece of paper," said Charles Norwood of the Irving Independent School District in Texas. 

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Idaho utility hard drives — and data — turn up on eBay
ComputerWorld
May 4, 2006

Anybody with five bucks and a little patience may be able to score sensitive corporate or customer data on eBay.

Idaho Power Co. discovered that possibility last week as it scrambled to track down company disk drives that had been sold on eBay without having been scrubbed first. Data on the drives, which had been used in servers, contained proprietary company information such as memos, correspondence with some customers and confidential employee information, the company said.

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