Folks, today is World Cancer Day. In 2005, 7.6million people died of cancer worldwide. That’s just plain crazy.

Get checked, get off your but and exercise, eat better, take care of yourself and each other every day.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/232998

So my Apple Time Capsule died back in September. It seems that the first run units had an issue with power supplies. So much so that someone setup a registration website where you can register your fallen Time Capsule (http://timecapsuledead.org/). Seems that 18months of operation is the key time frame before it goes kaput.

Anyway my local Apple store very generously offered me a replacement (how about that!). However, when I asked about what their data destruction policy was surrounding returned Time Capsule devices, the reply was that Apple doesn’t have one.

For those of you who don’t know, the Apple Time Capsule is a backup device that wirelessly backs up all of your Apple computers to the 1TB hard drive that is on board the device. So in this case when the power supply died, leaving the hard drive containing the data completely intact. When your device dies, Apple exchanges it with a new device. So you have handed a full unencrypted backup of all of your computer’s data over to Apple and they don’t have a policy that restricts what they can do with that data.

In my case Apple didn’t have the exact model of my Time Capsule in stock. They did the exchange paperwork and ordered my new one. I have to bring my broken TC back later this week for exchange. Since the paperwork is now done, I took it upon myself to do a little surgery. I opened up the device, mounted the drive directly to my Mac and erased the data properly. I’m hoping that the exchange will still go through later this week.

Now I am stuck with a decision of what to do with my new Time Capsule. I’m seriously thinking about just eBaying it because I don’t want to be in a position for this to occur again. It’s not worth the risk of the data for me. I will just continue to back it up on my NAS.

I wonder if Apple will adopt a data destruction policy concerning these type of backup systems? As the current consumer base becomes more and more educated on data security issues, I think the manufacturers will have to deal with the issue of security on returned devices.