Most disposal disputes are vocabulary disputes.
"Wiped" means four different things depending on who signed the ticket. These are the definitions AUTONOMIQ uses in every certificate, contract and audit response.
- Clear
- Logical overwrite using standard read/write commands, resisting keyboard-level recovery. Appropriate for redeployment inside the same trust boundary.
- Purge
- Sanitization resisting laboratory recovery: block erase, cryptographic erase, or verified overwrite. Required for any media leaving your estate.
- Destroy
- Physical shredding, disintegration or incineration to a documented particle size. Media is unusable and unreadable afterwards.
- Cryptographic erase
- Destruction of the media encryption key on a self-encrypting drive, rendering ciphertext unrecoverable. Only valid where the controller supports verified key destruction.
- Chain of custody
- Unbroken, timestamped record of who physically held an asset between retirement and final disposition, with a named custodian at every hop.
- Open interval
- A gap between two custody events where no custodian is recorded. AUTONOMIQ surfaces these as alerts instead of closing them by inference.
- Certificate of erasure
- Document recording method, tool, verification result, operator and timestamps for a single asset, carrying a hash of the underlying record.
- Ghost asset
- An asset the finance ledger still carries that no longer exists physically, or vice versa. The most common source of failed disposal reporting.
- EOL forecast
- Predicted retirement date derived from warranty expiry, lease return date, depreciation schedule and battery or SMART health.
- R2v3
- SERI's Responsible Recycling standard, 2023 revision, governing recycling processors and the vendors downstream of them.
- e-Stewards
- Alternative recycling certification with strict prohibitions on exporting hazardous e-waste to developing countries.
- Downstream vendor
- Any party receiving material after your primary processor. Unverified downstream is where most recycling claims fail an audit.
- NIST SP 800-88r1
- US guideline defining the Clear, Purge and Destroy categories and the verification expected for each media type.
- Settlement statement
- Itemised record of resale proceeds, logistics costs and net recovery, posted back against the original asset record.
- Legal hold
- Instruction preserving data relevant to litigation or investigation. Assets under hold must never be scheduled for sanitization.
- Data residency
- Constraint requiring records and certificates for a given estate to remain stored within a defined region.