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.

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, b

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 a

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, yo

PC Disposal is featured in this radio discussion about the growing importance and difficulty of proper computer disposal and recycling.

A recycling article primarily focusing on data security for consumers when disposing of old equipment. PC Disposal is quoted several times.

Consumer interest in safely ditching data has been fueled by a steady stream of reports of personal records found on used equipment. In May, a German maker of disk