IT@Pitt

Nugget 1: IT recycling and privacy

I found this article about criminals recovering personal information from discarded cell phones and other electronics while I was surfing the net the other day and it really made me take a step back. Myself and many of my friends, like most 20 somethings, tend to go through cell phones like tissues. It seems like I find myself back at the Verizon, Cricket etc. at least once a month helping a friend pick out a new phone because their previous one just wasn't suiting their fancy any more. Usually once a new more tech. savvy phone has been picked out the older "out of date phone" is donated to a battered women's shelter.
A few years back a friend of mine was doing a internship at a shelter for battered women and informed me that her shelter, and many shelters like hers, collected used cell phones and their chargers to give to battered women to be used in case of an emergency. I, like most of my friends, thought this was a really noble cause and began giving our stockpiles of disregarded phones to this shelter without a second thought. We all just assumed that they would be going to a trustworthy cause and never thought to erase our memory from the phone. However, this story has made me think a bit differently about this practice. I am not going to stop giving my used cell phones to battered women's shelters, but I am going to make sure that I delete the memory on my cell phone before I do it and I will make sure that I inform all of my friends about the benefits of deleting memory before donation of a used IT good.
Identity and personal information theft is becoming more and more prevalent in today's modern society and thefts are coming up with new ways to retrieve personal information as this article proves.Young people need to more conscious of identity theft and that it can and will happen to them if they are not careful with what information they allow to enter the public domain.

posted by julie @ 10:44 AM