How many times in Hollywood movies have you seen somebody frantically feeding papers into a shredder before the authorities arrive on the scene? It may be a common trope, but this doesn’t resemble how people use professional shredders today.
Everybody has sensitive documents which could cause a devastating data breach if they got into the wrong hands. Having such information is an inevitable part of being a citizen — it doesn’t mean you have something to hide.
Please keep reading to learn more about how professional shredding works in the real world.
Home Shredding:
Every day people are targeted by scammers who try to piece together whatever personal information about strangers they can get their hands on. People hire a paper shredding company every day to ensure that their home is free of data liabilities that could come back to bite them later.
Here are a few of the items professional shredders commonly need to destroy:
- Tax documents
- Banking information
- Contracts
- Pages with passwords and usernames
Especially with more people than ever working remotely, having sensitive information at home is more common than ever. If you have these or other such documents at home, the safest thing to do is get them professionally shredded.
Commercial Shredding:
It’s impossible to do business for any length of time without generating paperwork. From the smallest business to the largest corporation, there’ll be an endless procession of things like receipts, HR documents, contracts and agreements, and other paper documents which corporate saboteurs or identity thieves would love to possess.
Just as with home shredding, professional shredders can destroy your sensitive documents on-site or remotely. For example, if you are located in California, you can look for shredding services in San Francisco to dispose of your documents securely.
Even if they aren’t connected to the internet, electronics are a common source of data leaks, and these devices need to be eliminated with the same thoroughness as paper documents. Professional shredders will destroy the microchips on the device, so it’s impossible for a data thief to retrieve information.
Do you have old phones, computers, or other electronics that you used for work? Obsolete technology might not be useful in your day-to-day life, but a corporate saboteur would love to find it!
Call a professional shredder to get rid of electronics that are no longer useful safely. While some such devices like computers and phones are an obvious vector for identity theft, other devices that you may not think of also contain very sensitive information.
If your office or home office contains an old photocopier or printer memory card, calling a professional shredder to eliminate it is the safest course of action you can take.
People in all walks of life need to be careful that their personal and professional information doesn’t fall into the wrong hands. While the most prominent victims of identity theft get the bulk of the news coverage, it’s an issue that can affect anyone. Call professionals to help you steer clear of all risks associated with data theft.
