If anyone cares about their privacy they'll put their old unwanted storage devices through a shredder.
Hard drives, cell phones, thumbdrives, gps units, in fact anything that contains flash memory should be turned into milkshake once you're finished with it.
That's ridiculous. Since it's not magnetic media, a good full null format will do the job.
Null format 100% of a thumbdrive? How is that done exactly, making sure you nuke all the reserve areas?
And how would you null format all the flash inside a phone or gps unit?