PC World sells "new" hard drive with personal data on

A WESTERN DIGITAL hard drive sold as new in a major PC World outlet in London on Monday contained a couple's personal data including spreadsheets, VAT information and other sensitive information.

We bought the Western Digital 20GB Caviar drive along with a CD drive from the Tottenham Court Road branch of PC World because we were building a new PC.

But after the operating system software failed to install correctly, we examined the hard drive and found that it contained a number of Word documents and Excel wordsheets belonging to an individual and his partner, based in West London.

The package was sold intact with a black and white security label saying "do not open before purchase", and was for sale with other new drives in the superstore.

A representative for PC World said she was puzzled at how the incident could have occurred.

She thought there were a couple of possibilities. Those were - that the drive was received in that condition from the manufacturer, or that the disk was returned by a customer as new and unused.

She said that if the disk had been returned as defective it would have been returned to the warehouse. The Dixons Group has a returns policy where defective products go back to the manufacturer for replacement.

The odds against an itinerant IT hack coming into the shop and picking up a drive like this must be pretty big. Wish we had the same luck on the nags or the lottery. µ