Who has more porn!?

[iago]

If you overwrite every byte on a harddrive once, you're good for 99.999% of the world.  Only the richest and most powerful organizations (US Government, and a few private data-recovery organizations) can recover it.  If you overwrite it 3 times, you're safe from probably everybody, except maybe the US Government.  If you overwrite it 7 times, you have absolutely nothing to worry about.

My drive scrubber says 7 times is government standard for secure data deletion.

Yeah, I believe that's the American number.  Here, it's 3 for low-risk data, and complete destruction for high-risk data. 

[Joe]

Well, hard drives go for about a dollar per 2GB, depending on brand, etc. Is Canada so broke it can't afford to just disenegrate (sp) them all?

[iago]

No, we just aren't that wasteful.  Why would you care if somebody managed to recover a copy of your mom's cake recipe off your harddrive?

(That's the example they always use at work, cake recipe's, it usually gets a laugh out of the person they're talking to)