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One man’s trash is another man’s new identity? Yes, because that “junk mail” you toss in the garbage contains valuable data about yourself. A crook bent on identity theft can potentially have a field day with your discarded pre-approved credit card applications, bank statements, etc. Using a paper shredder before throwing out letters and documents such as these will help protect you and your family.
You should take this same vigilant approach when recycling your devices, whether that be your computer,external hard drive, mobile phone or tablet. This ensures no matter where your recycled device ends up, you can feel secure knowing it contains zero data about you—and a factory reset will not necessarily achieve this.
Here’s how to “clean” the data on your mobile device:
How to “clean” the data on your computer: Before you get rid of your computer, you must make sure that it’s impossible to recover the data on the hard drive. Simply putting things in the trash can and deleting them is not enough. If someone is skilled enough, they can almost always retrieve data left over on a hard drive. It’s your choice on how tough you make it for your computer’s new owner to do that.So don’t rely on these tasks.
Use a utility designed for wiping or erasing. This tool will overwrite everything with binary 1’s and 0’s. In fact, these tools meet government security standards and will overwrite each sector in your hard drive multiple times.McAfee Shredder, in which is included with McAfee LiveSafe™ service, is one of these tools. It will permanently wipe everything off your PC to protect your privacy.
This Earth Day, join the movement and demonstrate support for environmental protection. Just make sure to protect yourself first!
This content is provided by an external author without editing by Finextra. It expresses the views and opinions of the author.
Sergiy Fitsak Managing Director, Fintech Expert at Softjourn
14 August
Oleksandr Strozhemin Co-founder and CEO at Trinetix
13 August
Elaine Mullan Head of Marketing and Business Development at Corlytics
12 August
Abhinav Paliwal CEO at PayNet Systems- A Neo Banking Software Platform
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