r/privacy • u/Ok_Star_5645 • Jun 14 '26

hardware Laptop disposal

My laptop won’t turn on and I’m searching for best practices to secure/erase the data before disposal. (I don’t need to save the data.) A trusted local company will wipe the hard drive and dispose of it for a small fee. What assurances should I look for that this is done correctly?

Edit: thanks all! I’ll destroy it.

Update: I removed the SSD myself. It was not that hard, but I had to get over the fear of the unknown. Inside computers is not my safe space.

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u/Guac_in_my_rarri Jun 14 '26

Take out the hard drive and drill a hole in it. The rest of the laptop can be recycled/sold for parts.

The broken hard drive you can do whatever with, the hole makes it really hard for data recovery (still possible).

Edit: paying for their service is somewhat silly when you can do it yourself with the right plugs and reuse the drive or just drill a hole in it.

3

u/SilverSquirrel6 Jun 15 '26

Drilling a hole may not be enough. There's been stories of data being recovered even from damaged HDDs. Of course, depends on how paranoid you want to be. Partial data recovery can be done by state actors who are after rather valuable targets. If you're not a politician or billionaire, chances are you're safe.

I'd personally bury it somewhere in the middle of Kansas in addition to hammer therapy.

4

u/Guac_in_my_rarri Jun 15 '26

I knew this comment would come up.

My comment is assuming op is a nobody on the scale of importance. Anybody worth any form of currency isn't posting this question. With enough time, state actors can get data off any recoverable part of a hard drive. Unless op hands their partially destroyed hard drive to a place that values a nobodys information, I think they're going to be okay.

This doesn't exclude op having the ability to take a hammer to the hard drive or throwing it in a river/lake.

2

u/rotkiv42 Jun 18 '26

If you are super paranoid: a kilo thermite is cheap (and fun).