My wife and I are getting rid of old papers going back as far as 30 years. Some of them are old credit card chits (remember them?) that have our signatures on them. She thinks we ought to get a shredder and shred them. Is this really necessary?
If you don’t have that old card any more then no, but someone could forge your signature.
If hours of sitting and feeding a shredder does not appeal to you, have a bonfire. Roast marshmallows.
You can’t be too careful.
Or just spend one minute: meet the garbage truck.
Dump your documents in your regular garbage can, sandwiched between two “accidently” torn-open garbage bags full of spoiled food, uncooked rotten fish,dirty diapers etc.
Stand there and watch while they load your garbage can into the truck and compress it along with a hundred other households…
Sure, you documents are still there, ready to be stolen by somebody digging through the city dump .But it seems pretty impractical.
Some cities have shred-a-thons where you can go to a certain location and a waiting commercial shredding truck will take care of all your papers in no time flat. They may or may not charge you a nominal fee. It would be worth checking it out in your area.
Or, ask yourself if you’ve ever seen anyone going through your garbage can or recycling bin, pawing through the coffee grounds and Sunday paper advertisements looking for something that you already give waiters and cashiers without a second thought.
If the answer is “no”, you could probably skip the step of personally escorting your trash to the garbage truck, and just leave it all in the can.
Yes, people do go thru garbage looking for stuff. It’s not everywhere, all the time, you might not see it. But it is surprisingly frequent.
Anything, no matter how old, that has account numbers, names, etc., can be used for evil.
How careful should you be? Certainly shredding will work. What I do to bulk materials is put it in a plastic tub, fill with water, let it sit for a week, mixing it up from time to time, compost it.
You might not be able to do that last step. But once turned into a slurry, you can throw it out.
I do a quicker version of this several times a week with those credit card offers and such. Run tap water over the paper, mush it up, twist it around, into the trash.
As a computer person, I see this “Oh, what are the chances of that happening?” attitude all the time and it’s maddening. You have to take security seriously.
More important in classic rock and metal, less so in indie and emo.
The OP’s question is “Is this really necessary” and I think you’re going to get answers that offer more opinions than factual answers. Everyone has their own comfort level with such things. Personally, I take almost no precautions of this sort. However, I have no beef with people who feel safer doing more.
**ftg **says
I don’t agree. You certainly can do that, but you don’t have to. And if you don’t, most of the time everything will be fine. (And some of the time, something bad will happen.)
Just shred it, you throw it out without shredding and you simply don’t know who is going to have access to it and unless you’re sure you’re none of it can be used for fraudulent purposes, it’s better to be safe than sorry. I would definitely shred anything with any personal details or signatures on them.
Shredders are fairly inexpensive these days and if you have so much it is impractical or too laborious to do it yourself, you can find someone reputable who will do it for you. I would rather do it myself personally, but there is a whole industry that does this sort of thing.
That’s ridiculous.
You probably won’t die if you don’t shred your old documents, so I wouldn’t call it a necessity. If you plan to continue disposing of documents with private information in the future then you may as well get a shredder. That way you won’t become one of the rare people whose secure information was taken from the trash, and you’ll have the side benefit that shredding things is fun. And it will make your wife happy. Isn’t it worth it just for that?
I asked about this years ago and no one was able to come up with a single instance of a person randomly digging through household garbage in order to steal secure information:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=249854&highlight=tampons
My dad burned that kind of stuff. Of course it was easier then, because there was a fire in the living room or down-stairs.
I wonder now if he learned it from his dad, or from his military service.
:eek: Jesus, you’ve got a lot of time on your hands.
I’d rather pay a service to monitor my credit profile, and alert me when something untoward happens.
And to find that you had to go looking for tampons 
Anyway, I remember something about a guy who got in a lot of trouble because they found his name on an envelope at the bottom of a half ton of garbage. YMMV
If your credit is really bad, then don’t worry … who’d want to steal your identity …
But seriously … make certain nothing has your Social Security Number … that’s the one piece of information you never want to have leave your control.
My mom and dad learned the hard way not to get a cheap shredder. It made a big mess with paper dust all around the wastebasket. They have to vacuum the rug every time they shred a bunch of paper.
Look at reviews and see whats popular. Sams Club sells a Royal 1600MX Cross-Cut Shredder that I bought. It had a 5 star rating with over 50 reviews. member price is $99, Amazon has it for a little more. Just an example. So far I really like it. No paper dust on the floor. Easy pull out basket that I dump into a large garbage bag. Doesn’t require buying a special bag. The sliding top is a nice safety feature that covers the shredder slot.
Thanks everyone. I guess I will avoid that $35 shredder that Staples advertises. I think maybe our recycling centre has a shredder available. For a one-off cleaning up of old documents, that might be the simplest.
I shred papers with my SSN and bank account and credit card numbers. I cannot imagine anyone could do anything useful with my signature unless they had a lot of other data to go with it.
I also do wonder how often people use trash/recycle as sources for identity theft when you can harvest millions of records from a single hack into Target.
Surprise me. How frequent is it?
Sometimes people will go through garbage looking for stuff without an evil intent. Do you live near a college campus? I remember those days. Many of us would root through garbage looking for useful or interesting stuff to tinker with - old 100MB hard disks, things like that. I don’t recall anyone coming across anything particularly sensitive, but then we weren’t looking for those things anyway.