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If your job involves having to destroy hard disks and make sure that their data is impossible to recover, you’ll know that it can be an expensive business: properly disposing of each hard disk can cost between £5 and £10 and, when you’re managing the IT affairs of potentially large businesses, these costs can mount up.

simply chopping the platter in half wouldn’t remove the data” and confirmed that it could be recovered – but the costs of retrieving any remaining information “would be prohibitive”. That’s because you’d need “something along the lines of an electron scanning microscope” to read the data from the remains of the platter – and those currently sell second-hand for at least £40,000. Tanfield-Johnson also confirmed that, once you’d cracked open a hard disk to extract the platters within, recovering any data would become even more difficult, because you’d need “the same model and make of [circuit] board” to access each track of data on the disk. So, unless you’re willing to spend tens of thousands of pounds, it looks like your data is safe.

Staff at mobile phone company T-Mobile passed on millions of records from thousands of customers to third party brokers, the firm has confirmed.

The Data Protection Act bans the selling on of data without prior permission from the customer and a fine of £5,000 can be imposed following a successful prosecution.

Government opens data to public

Around 70 teenagers had gathered for this weekend event which is the brainchild of Rewired State - an organisation thinking of clever ways to free up public data.

different groups as they spread themselves across the third floor of the Googleplex, taking advantage of the free wi-fi - and food - laid on by the search company.

different groups as they spread themselves across the third floor of the Googleplex, taking advantage of the free wi-fi - and food - laid on by the search company.

"It's invisible to the user but logs everything: communication, users' locations, people's proximity by doing continuous Bluetooth scans."

Friendships can be inferred with 95% accuracy from call records and the proximity of users, says a new report.

but to carry on this "reality mining" in contexts ranging from the modelling of the spread of disease t