Be Careful Disposing of Office Equipment
Planning a Fall Cleanup at your office?
Better be careful how you dispose of that old office equipment. If it happens to fall into the wrong hands, you could find yourself in trouble with the State Bar and your malpractice carrier.
“If someone gets to your information in a disposed piece of equipment, it could get really ugly really fast,” says Lawyers Mutual in its Office Equipment Disposal Policy. “Stop and think about what is potentially available on even a fax machine: firm bank account records, confidential client information and confidential personal information for employees. There is a good chance the State Bar will consider this an ethics violation for failure to take proper precautions to protect client confidentiality. Malpractice claims are likely to follow suit. HIPAA and Sarbanes-Oxley violations could also apply. (Remember that personal information for employees? Accidentally exposing their healthcare information is a HIPAA violation, too!).”
Download a copy of the Lawyers Mutual Office Equipment Disposal Policy.
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More Pointers for Office Equipment Disposal
Avoid options that remove data do not permanently delete items from the hard drive.
Recycle Bin and Empty is the equivalent of taking the small trash can under your desk and emptying it into a larger trash can in a common area. The items are somewhere you can’t see them, but they aren’t gone. Perhaps the average user can’t locate them, but anyone with basic tech skills or knowledge to download the right application can quickly recover the files.
Departitioning or partitioning the hard drive is the equivalent of knocking down a wall. It doesn’t actually destroy what’s on the other side, just rearranges the space. While this is labeled as formatting, your computer doesn’t actually overwrite the data, which means it is recoverable. Free applications will recover your information easily.
Hiring a Professional
Properly preparing equipment for disposal can be a daunting task. If you don’t have someone in the office who feels comfortable taking on this responsibility, hire an expert to handle it for you. Hiring a professional will provide peace of mind that an expert will not overlook any critical steps in the data wiping process. Obtaining professional assistance in equipment disposal is essentially the same as hiring a company for shredding or document storage. You’ll need to obtain a written statement regarding confidentiality, destruction methods, and indemnity should they fail to adequately destroy information.
If your firm is not interested in investing the time or money into “refurbishing” old computers, there is a “quick and dirty” option for the destruction of data on a hard drive. All of the data on a computer is stored in a removable hard drive. If the hard drive is removed, the data is no longer accessible. By removing and physically destroying the hard drive (with the equivalent of a sledgehammer), the data and physical hard drive will be destroyed. In most instances, the hard drive can be replaced for less than $100 plus the operating system.”
SOURCE: Lawyers Mutual
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