Dave Winer wrote a while back about Apple's terrifying hard drive replacement policy, which seemed completely absurd. I have good news though
I took my MacBook Pro into the AppleStore at Lakeside (a shopping centre outside London) for repair recently. Now, I've got a lot to complain about AppleCare - namely that they can just declare your repair to be 'non-warranty' without providing evidence and then charge you an arm and a leg for the repair to happen. It's going to take some time for me to find anything positive to say about Apple until my bank account gets replenished. But I did find out in the process that Apple has now changed their policy regarding user's hard drives. Apparently, the new policy is that if you ask forcefully enough with the Genius, they'll note on the form "Customer would like to keep HDD."
My advocacy for keeping my hard drive was extremely simple - "Security! That hard drive contains my bank details, credit card numbers, SSH private keys and GPG keys. Even though it's been formatted once, that's not enough to prevent someone - whether my ever-more-observant government or an identity thief from recovering data from it. When it comes to such a huge box of interlinking personal data, the only person I trust to dispose of it with any degree of competence is myself. I don't want it being shipped off to a Chinese factory where some kid being paid tuppence to open up toxic computer hardware decides that he's going to sell the stupid Westerners' user hard drives to crackers on the black market - I'd much rather take it home, do a format-to-nil forty or so times, then keep it in a shoebox for ten years until the data is outdated and then knock it to shreds with a sledgehammer. It's my data, damnit, and I'll dispose of it myself". Okay, I didn't say exactly that - but a slightly more mumbled version, but I did make a point that it was my data and that not getting it back would be a security risk.
The assistant manager bought the argument, noted it on the form and I now have my broken hard drive in a little silver bag to do with whatever I want.
If you are going to have a replacement HDD in your Macintosh, be sure to argue with them and make sure they know up front that you wish to keep your hard drive. And if they refuse to service the machine and return the drive, go to a different store or AASP. However paranoid you are about security, you probably are not paranoid enough. Which reminds me - I need to change a few hundred passwords, setup some Keychains, put my SSH certificates back in place and install GPG again. One day all this will work seamlessly...
