Regarding Apple’s Hard Drive Repair Policy

Matt Deatherage, on Dave Winer’s argument that Apple’s “we keep your old hard drive if it needs to be replaced during servicing” policy is a security issue:

The “problem” isn’t that Apple kept his hard drive. The problem is that Dave handed his sensitive data to a third-party in the first place. You don’t leave your router open out of an “expectation” that bad guys won’t touch your network, and you don’t hand your hard drive to third parties with the expectation that they’ll decide not to look at it.

Update: Matt has extensively updated his piece to address the question of what to do if the drive is so severely damaged that you can’t even erase it. That seems to be an actual problem with Apple’s policy.

★ Wednesday, 2 January 2008