It is out of utter laziness that I throw my own junk mail in the trash prior to destruction. I, like many of you, am not void of the “it won’t happen to me” mentality. This is why I challenge you to dig through your own trash and see how many documents you tossed that violate the rules of shredding!
Identity theft is and has been the number one growing crime in America for several years. Government programs, companies and personal shredders are all there to help protect us from identity theft, but we have to start to help ourselves in order for them to be effective.
When you get to work, if you aren’t there already, go through the trash bin in your copy room/center. Count the number of documents that contain customer information, including customer names and or contact information, contract information, or marketing and sales information. If you count one, that is too many and your company is at risk. You and your company are responsible for keeping that information confidential and out of harms way. Personal and private information should be kept that way. You and your company should be more careful with others information than you are with your own. You want that from the companies you give your information to.
These common, but detrimental, slip ups are easily resolved by replacing garbage cans with shredding bins for all paper products and leaving garbage cans only in the kitchens and restrooms.
It is easy, cost effective and efficient for a company to shred everything, rather than let someone else’s personal information revealed because an employee didn’t realize the repercussions of throwing away that piece of paper prior to destruction.
As for you at home, it’s your identity and therefore your choice, but taking a couple extra seconds to properly destroy your junk mail is well worth avoiding the possible destruction of your identity.
If you are in the greater Los Angeles and Orange County areas, please contact Go Green Mobile Shredding for a personalized quote for all your shredding needs. Go Green is a certified shredding company that also gives back to the environment by recycling all the destroyed materials.
