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MSU has adopted a policy on protecting the confidentiality of social security numbers. Its title is "Social Security Number Privacy Policy" and it resides at: http://www.hr.msu.edu/HRsite/Documents/Uwide/Policies/ssnPrivacy.htm The policy was adopted pursuant to pursuant to Section 4 of the Michigan Social Security Number Privacy Act, which takes effect January 1, 2006. The MSU SSN policy states, in part: "Electronic documents containing social security numbers should be destroyed in a manner consistent with the "best practices" guidance issued by the Vice Provost for Libraries, Computing and Technology." LCT has posted a document, "Best Practices in Disposal of Computers and Electronic Storage Media" which appears at: http://lct.msu.edu/bestpractices/rww-lct-safecomputerdisposal-nov2005.pdf The article covers best practices on this topic in general. A companion article in our computing knowledge base discusses specific tools for specific operating systems. That article appears at: http://techbase.msu.edu/viewpathfinder.asp?id=6567 NAG members and others may want to review the best practices document and the companion knowledge base article. If there are good techniques we need to add, please let us know. Please feel free to share comments and suggestions here, or by sending me a note. Thanks, /rich