PC Recycler uses a $100,000 machine that employs a process known as degaussing to wipe the devices clean of data, the company’s founder Jeremy Farber told the Washington Post in an interview.
“A couple of our big customers early on were big government contractors and…they were really interested in information security. It was a very big priority to them, more so than the environmental aspect of it”, Farber related.
Degaussing works by eliminating the magnetic field that allows an electronic device to store data. The process is named after Carl Friedrich Gauss, who was an early researcher in the field of magnetism.
“Because a lot of the attacks come over the net, it gets a lot of publicity, but there are just as many breaches that happen through physical loss. A lot of people don’t understand that the information is just as accessible once the device is offline”, Farber told the newspaper.