E-Waste; Ghana: Hard Drives
In Last week’s blog I brought up
the topic of the digital dumping ground in Ghana, my post was basically focused
on the effects the waste had on the citizens. I brought up how the developed
nations sort of trick the Ghanaians into accepting their waste. In one sense we
are taking advantage of them, but in this post I’m going to focus how they are
sort of getting back at us.
Ghana is listed by the U.S state
department as one of the top sources of cyber-crime in the world. All of our
waste that is sent to Ghana is sorted through, hard-drives are major items that
are salvaged and sold. Ghanaians even admit that organized criminals comb
through these hard-drives and find personal information that can be used in
scams.
You may not even realize it but if
anyone ever gets a hold of your old hard drive no matter where your personal
information is hidden, or even if it’s been deleted, it can be easily
retrieved. The only way to completely keep your information safe is to destroy
your hard-drive physically, for example smashing it with a hammer.
No matter whom it is, anyone’s
files can be seen through their hard drive, even the U.S government. Information
on a twenty-two million dollar contract was retrieved by a hard-drive purchased
from Ghana. It was later found out that this drive had come from Northrop
Grumman, one of America’s largest military contractors. Specifically, the drive
“contains details about sensitive, multi-million dollar U.S. government
contracts.” Drives have also been found with contracts with NASA and the defense
intelligent agency even homeland security.
On a more personal level,
hard-drives that you have “recycled” could be being displayed right now in an
open-air market in Ghana. Anyone can purchase it for a low price and find out
intimate personal details about your life. Anything from private pictures and
videos can be retrieved to financial data information, credit card numbers and online
transaction. Ghanaians can get your bank numbers and then retrieve all your
money in your account, they simply log into your atm card and have access to
all the information they need.
Reading this and finding this
information may be appalling at first. You may think of Ghanaians doing this as
bad people. But think about it, this is how they’ve been raised. They’ve grown
up in waste. When the U.S ships our E-waste to their dumping grounds we are
giving them our old electronics as donations.
If someone donates something to you there are no restrictions on what
you can do with it. In our country incidents
like this may be illegal but in theirs it’s how they survive. Yes, it may be
morally wrong but they aren’t raised to think that way. It relates to the
in-class discussion that we had a few weeks ago about how in the undeveloped country
jelly was helping the young boy to hack into peoples bank accounts. The
majority of the class didn’t see this as wrong in their situation. It is almost
the same thing.
http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/ghana804/video/video_index.html
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