Don't throw that old USB flash drive away, donate it

Whether you call it a thumb drive, memory stick, flash drive, or disgo, by now you've probably got at least one unused USB flash drive lying around the house or office. Instead of chucking that schwag into the digital dump and making Iron Eyes Cody cry, why not donate your 16MB (or greater drive) to Inveneo in their quest to leverage ICT and close the digital divide in developing countries? The flash drives will be provided to students, aid workers, and small business entrepreneurs among others in need of a quick and easy means to store and share information. Come on, everybody's doing it, and besides, mom always said it's better to make tax deductible donations, than to receive. Click the read link below to contribute or read on for more details about Inveneo.

[Via boingboing]

[Crazylink @ Dec 13th 2006 9:36AM]

I don't suppose they take ones that don't work well/at all.

[Matt B @ Dec 13th 2006 9:37AM]

I think its a ploy for developing countries to see my companies financials from 4 years ago.

[Chocolate Starfish @ Dec 13th 2006 9:37AM]

How long till we see pictures of a tribal person with the keyring end of one of these things dangling from his nose?

[Bobickus @ Dec 13th 2006 10:32AM]

Okay...I'll play devil's advocate/buzzkill...

I'm all for recycling, charity and giving a helping hand, however...

Would the costs of collecting and processing individually donated USB drives not make this a less efficient method of delivering portable storage capacity than simply finding a bulk supplier using the same monies?

I also think Tiny Tim should pull himself up by his hand-me-down bootstrap.

[Evan @ Dec 13th 2006 10:39AM]

This is a bad idea. Those USB flash drives could contain confidential data, personal photos, porn, etc. We can't be assured the drives will be properly cleared. The problem was illustrated last week when Gamestop sold a used MemoryStick containing porn. http://www.nbc5i.com/news/10482632/detail.html

[Don @ Dec 13th 2006 11:30AM]

Ummmm - Couldn't YOU ensure that they are clear of data? Silly.

[Matt @ Dec 13th 2006 10:43AM]

Please update your post reminding people to sanitize the drives....

Thanks.

[surfwax95 @ Dec 13th 2006 10:48AM]

Should I wipe the pr0n off of it first?

Nah...

[Grey Acumen @ Dec 13th 2006 11:09AM]

Just remember to erase all of your porn first

[David Smith @ Dec 13th 2006 11:35AM]

Well this is cute. Today the campus network has been down here at SunyIT and I had to hand in my cell-phone programming class homework. I needed to somehow get the files to my teacher's laptop so he could use his special cable and BREW signature key to install it on the phone. Wireless network wasn't giving an IP address, some phones didn't work, webserver was down this morning.. Everything has been totally FUBAR and it's finals week. Neither me nor my teacher had a USB thumbdrive. So I went to the school bookstore and they were selling a thumbdrive with 128 MB of memory for $19.99. Instead of that, I bought a CD-R for 98 cents and burned the project onto the disc and gave that to my teacher so he could copy the files onto the cell-phone.

I could use a thumbdrive, even a 32 meg one.. I'm taking donations, and I live here in the States..

[Monte @ Dec 13th 2006 11:36AM]

I've actually never owned a single USB Flash memory device.

[anon @ Dec 13th 2006 5:32PM]

Who cares?

[CoolVanilla @ Dec 13th 2006 11:37AM]

"The problem was illustrated last week when Gamestop sold a used MemoryStick containing porn."

"No mom, I swear... that porno was already on the card..."

[Jeff Wishnie @ Dec 13th 2006 11:40AM]

> Okay...I'll play devil's advocate/buzzkill...
> Would the costs of collecting and processing
> individually donated USB drives not make this a
> less efficient method ...
>

Hi, this is Jeff from Inveneo. Donations are in fact cheaper for us than buying new ones bulk.

Processing the sticks is automated and we regularly ship equipment to our African installations.

As thumbdrives weigh almost nothing, there is essentially zero additional cost to packing them in with existing deliveries.

Though, if you want to save us the trouble of testing and erasing the drives, feel free to buy as some new ones!

https://www.amazon.com/gp/registry/wishlist/24W5GBT0UE8B0/ref=wl_web/

[Don @ Dec 13th 2006 11:48AM]

"The problem was illustrated last week when Gamestop sold a used MemoryStick containing porn."

What's the problem there? To me it sounds like a bonus buy!

[Lewis Roberts @ Dec 13th 2006 1:31PM]

Vista contains an interesting new feature which allows you to use something such as a memory stick as cache memory to improve performance over the use of the paging file on the HDs.

Donations may be down on expectations post Jan 30th 2007.

[Nick C. @ Dec 13th 2006 2:30PM]

I call mine a jump-drive...cause I like how that sounds

[tiuk @ Dec 13th 2006 2:55PM]

I call it a flash drive, because that seems like the most accurate term IMO. Also, names like jump drive and memory stick refer to products by specific companies.

[Pep @ Dec 13th 2006 3:32PM]

Do they take flash memory cards as well? I don't have any thumb drives (I have lost at least 6 of them) but I sure have a bunch of 16-to-128MB CF and SD cards lying around I wouldn't mind donating...

[Bobickus @ Dec 13th 2006 4:11PM]

Jeff,

Thanks for the response to my question. Of course, now I feel like a heartless, naysaying grinch with a heart two sizes too small.

[jade @ Dec 13th 2006 4:44PM]

This is amazing. How is it a "bad" or "useless" idea, if you're just going to be throwing it away anyway? Might as well let someone get some use out of it!
Some people need a major reality check on here.

[anon @ Dec 13th 2006 5:34PM]

Because all the data ever saved on it could easily be recovered. Major security issues.

[Jayson @ Dec 13th 2006 9:08PM]

jade and the others who think it is wrong to "neglect" the needy of flash drives:

Lets face facts and not fear saying the truth. We are talking about shipping these off to countries well known for running email scams and ebay scams. So, what is to make anyone think they will not spend a bit of time extracting the good bits of "deleted" data from these thumb drives. Yes, yes, I know that they are not all busy trying to run a scam but the fact is that I see no reason to send them our old flash drives just as I see no reason to send our old shredded financial documents. We need to take out personal security seriously and this just seems too easy a method of extracting data.

The "reality check" is this; these drives can be a very big security risk. It is very careless of a group to ask for us to fork over our drives which may or may not contain personal data to send to Africa. Good intentions aside, they do not appear to have thought this through thoroughly. Nothing on their website points to what care they will take with properly handling these drives so as to avoid an information leak.

Also, where has Inveneo spent two seconds telling us what these will actually be used for? Their description is this �They can be used in 100's of useful ways by: Students, Aid Workers & Small Business Entrepreneurs. Uhh, that sounds like marketing speak to me. I would be hard pressed to think of 50 uses for a flash drive let alone 100s of them. They have the burden of showing us what reason they need them for and how they will be handled. It is not enough to tell us �they are for needy people�.

[minimage @ Dec 13th 2006 9:13PM]

I ran into the question of sanitizing them last night when I posted to my blog about Inveneo. According to what I read, it's not as easy a task as for a hard drive, because of the method used to write to the drives. It looks like the second-best thing to do to prevent unauthorized recovery is to encrypt sensitive data. If anyone has any better information, I'd love to know.

[I LOVE THE CAPS LOCK KEY @ Dec 14th 2006 2:38AM]

Great, donate your flash drive to aide poor helpless Nigerian Scamsters in storing your personal private data.. Arrgh

[I LOVE THE CAPS LOCK KEY @ Dec 14th 2006 2:47AM]

They have more important things to worry about other than flash drives. Hello, clean water anyone?

[V @ Dec 14th 2006 7:59AM]

o.O did any1 notice the pic engadget chose is on wiki and is a pic of a first 16mb "disgo" flash drive (the same Israeli company M-Systems made the very fist flash drive in 8mb capacity)

[MemoTrek @ Oct 21st 2007 4:33AM]

I like this idea! There are areas of the world where people still are happy to use floppy drives...

And especially for schools and learning institutions this would be a welcomed gift. Maybe we over at MemoTrek (http://www.memotrek.com) should think about something similar and start donating our returned or faulty drives to a good cause in developing countries.

[USB Company @ Jul 2nd 2009 5:50PM]

I bet there is a lot of people that have free promotional usbs laying around so if it can be put to use this is a good idea. Anyone now if there is someone who takes delievery of these as we at USB Company (www.usbcompany..co.uk) have a bunch laying around that we could give away.