Hi, all! Longtime PH user, pretty excited to have a project to share here.
Please feel free to ask me any questions. I just opened up the site yesterday, looking for as much feedback as possible.
And to those that have already upvoted, thanks for the love!
@therpgfanatic Hi, hope all is well.
The only way to guarantee that your data will never be accessed again is to completely destroy the disk. That's why we shred the disk and then send it to a recycler (where the shreds will be molten).
So, a hammer might make the drive useless for the most part. However, if you want to completely destroy the disk and keep a certificate of destruction for your records, the using Destroyer.io or a local shredding company (for bigger jobs) will do the trick.
Cheers!
@AlexNucci What I'm saying is, if I took a hammer and busted open the case and then broke the disc into a bunch of fragments, not even the FBI is going to be able to recover the data.
Not trying to pop your balloon but I imagine the first time you have a customer who isn't just paranoid and truly is under investigation by a police agency and they see your customer sent you a HD to be destroyed, the investigators are just going to intercept the package in the mail and claim it anyway. If anything your service is a red flag for police agencies to put someone under surveillance.
I'm not being an alarmist; that is exactly what will happen. Ross Ulbricht / Dread Pirate Roberts got caught because of his mail-order purchase history. The places he was ordering from were on a watch list.
@therpgfanatic Yup, taking the drive apart and putting a hammer to the disks to destroy them will do the trick.
If you're actively involved in illegal activities (without getting into the subject of justifying if what you're doing is right or wrong), you might want to take the necessary time and measures to destroy the drive yourself. At the very least, you might want to ship this to and from and unrelated address with an unrelated name. I'm very aware that this service is not for everyone, and we're not trying to be either.
This is a convenience service (much like a car wash, restaurant, dry cleaners or even Western Union), in the sense that people could do this for themselves. There will always be DIYers or extreme cases where people will want to do this without shipping it to us. You can do this locally, for example by going to your local shredding facility. Or order an on-site truck to come and do it. Both of those are obviously more expensive and/or time consuming.
The whole point of launching this project is seeing if there's enough demand for the right market, and at the right price, to build a sustainable business around it. Time will tell :)
Cheers!
@AlexNucci I'm just looking at it from the perspective of long term viability.
The kind of person most likely to need this kind of service is a tin-hat wearing type who is afraid of the government looking at whatever-it-is they are up to that they probably shouldn't be up to. And a lot of these types are going to be able to erase and destroy a HD themselves.
I'm also not sure if all of them do it, but I've seen big stacks of computers -- hard-drives and all -- at metal scrap facilities where people are paid for scrap. So you are competing in that niche as well, only you want people to pay you instead of you paying them.
I hope you have success but I feel it's going to be a small niche.
@therpgfanatic Could be, that's the whole point of launching this project an seeing what the outcome is. I'm pretty quick in building, launching, partnering right and testing. Like I ended my previous reply, time will tell.
In response to the "tin-hat wearing" reference, I won't speculate as to who the typical customer will be. I can tell you that small businesses have already bought from us, and orders to destroy multiple drives.
The biggest problem with this project, as I see it, is figuring out if we can acquire customers profitably. And to this end, again, time will tell.
Thanks for the kind wishes, same to you with your Indiegogo campaign.
Cheers!
@cherianthomas Great question. Naturally, most of the inquiries or concerns around this service are going to revolve around trust and security.
The obvious and straight forward answer is that we're not. The more complicated one would be that I'd break a large amount of serious laws if we were doing something like that.
When testing the service out, some users asked for further assurance . The solution that seemed to be liked the most involved a video feed (or pictures), that showed how we opened the package, removed the drive and destroyed it. That's something that I'd build down the road if I get enough requests or feel that it would move the needle in the right direction.
For now, here's what we do: receive the drive, degauss (demagnetize) it, destroy it. The customer is notified when the package arrives and when the drive is destroyed, at which point we send a certificate of destruction.
Also, I'm in the process of getting our NAID AAA, eStewards, R2 and ISO 14001 certifications. The machines and processes that we use follow all of their guidelines, it's just a matter of getting approved (and paying the fees).
Let me know if you have any other ideas on how we could show/proof that we're trustworthy. Interested in listening to any suggestions.
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