Questions about Apple recycling.

[TheTominator]

I think that a lot of tech disposal places are likely to have people who are adept at quickly extracting working hard drives from otherwise unusable machines and connecting those drives to dedicated data extraction stations. Where's there's some money to be had, there are people in the world who work in volume to extract your data and sell it for money.

So yes. I would take the extra steps to erase or otherwise make the drive unreadable before handing it off to someone to harvest.