From Asahi Shimbun
A man who won an Internet auction for used hard disks soon discovered that he was in the possession of confidential and sensitive government information that he had no business reading.
At first, the man, who owns an information technology company, was puzzled when he found repeated mention in the file names of Kanagawa Prefecture.
But he was in for a greater shock when he used recovery software and found that the files on the hard disks contained mountains of data compiled by the Kanagawa prefectural government.
The data included everything from individuals who were behind on their taxes and the amount; documents considering the seizure of assets; documents related to contract bid amounts; rosters of employees at public schools; and even design blueprints for electric power plants and water supply works.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday December 11 2019, @02:22PM
I think you're right that the standard is something like that. My point is that it's a standard that was created when hard drive implementation details were very different than they are now, and data could be readily recovered by inserting the platters in a drive that would read the gaps between tracks.
Cryptographic erasure is a wonderful alternative - but only if the encryption is theoretically unbreakable (which is... almost nothing in the face of emerging quantum computers) and the implementation is perfect. And as we've seen time and again with such drives, the implementation is often deeply flawed.