My boss was telling me about his exciting new year day 2013 spent cleaning out his home office. He indicated he removed bags and bags of trash. However, some of his trash couldn’t be thrown out until he could shred them since they were vital documents such as checking and credit card statements, health care bills, utility bills, etc. I for one don’t use a shredder but simply tear such documents up into semi-tiny pieces that a really diligent identity thief could put together.
So, my question is - what is the risk to your everyday American who throws their garbage into the trash for curbside pick up that any of their un-shredded vital documents will be gone through and be used for identity theft? I would contend that it is very small risk and at least less than your risk of falling prey to internet or phone scams. But, that is my hunch. Any statistics on the actual risk? Thanks.
The risk of identity theft via trash recovery is probably about the same from person to person (you’d have to Google to find stats re: how often it happens), but the risk from internet/phone scams depends on the gullibility of the potential victim.
There are many small risks in life, but if you keep exposing yourself to them over and over again, in the aggregate they can become a big risk. Example: the risk of being in a car crash during any single trip is extremely small, but you wear your seat belt every time, because you just don’t know when you’re going to get hit. Shredding sensitive documents is analogous: you could go your whole life without someone attempting to recover personal identifying info from your curbside trash, but the one time it happens, it could be a major pain in the ass for you. If you enjoy your financial security and have a lot of assets (an unblemished credit history is one such asset), then a shredder amounts to cheap insurance.
Plus the reputation hit from bad publicity over accidentally “releasing” someone else’s information in this fashion would be far more painful than the cost of a crosscut shredder. Several years ago, I came upon some financial papers for a pro athlete blowing around in the street. The nearby address on one of them suggested that they were from a management company/agent/whatever of some kind, and that someone had just dropped them, intact, into a recycling bin and put it out for collection, and the wind had whisked them out of the uncovered bin. I just dumped them back in and kept walking.
Now imagine if it had been an associate of the athlete coming over who happened upon these papers. Or someone unscrupulous.
A shredder is cheap insurance against what might happen due to a slip with garbage collection, a raccoon searching for food and tearing open bags, your readable trash being used as ticker-tape, etc. I know he said this was his info, but with how many people work at home, he might have printouts of other people’s info too.
If it’s a lot of documents, you really don’t need a shredder. You can put the documents in a large can; add water and laundry detergent; then stir up the paperwork every once in a while until it turns into a big glob. I know of people who take this extra step even after shredding the paper.
As far as identity theft, I’m sure that bigger problem is with people sitting behind a computer in a comfortable room in another country hacking into databases rather than someone doing dumpster diving to get credit card numbers. But that doesn’t mean an old fashion way of doing it still isn’t used.
In many jurisdictions, dumpster diving is perfectly legal and not considered a form of theft because trash placed for collection is deemed “abandoned property” under the law. That means that anyone, including police, nosy neighbors, or your mom can take anything they want from your trash and you have no way of getting it back. If a criminal takes your credit card statement from your trash and uses the information on it to run up your bill, you might have a case for credit card fraud but probably not traditional theft because the physical credit card bill itself is legally his now.
I wonder how common this is, versus the alternative. In several cities where I have lived, I’ve been aware of specific and explicit laws to the contrary. (This is in California.) In these cases, the rule is: Any trash, once placed at curbside for trash pickup, immediately becomes the property of the city. I am going to guess that, if several cities have such laws, then probably many cities do.
I’m guessing that one of the motives for such a law is to protect against dumpster diving, at least formally. How enforceable this is seems dubious – a document thief would have to be caught in the act (unlikely) and (even less likely) the police would have to give a damn. But there was at least one case, in an apartment complex where I lived, when police came out to question some dude who was seen rummaging through a dumpster, apparently looking for documents.
Other forms of trash-picking (collecting recyclables, looking for discarded furniture, or homeless people looking for dinner) remain common, even if technically illegal. I’m not aware of any extensive enforcement against such activities. I’ve noticed it’s getting more and more common for businesses, including supermarkets and restaurants, to keep their dumpster lids padlocked shut. Starve, ye homeless!
There was a brouhaha about this several years ago in (IIRC) Los Angeles. They passed a law requiring residents to recycle their empty cans via the recycle containers (blue bins or whatever). Now, some people were saving their cans on their own and taking them to recycling centers to gets some money back. The point here was, the city wanted that money. You were required to recycle via the city trash pick-up, whereby the city sold the scrap to recycling companies and got the money.
Anyone with a lick of sense can immediately see where that was going. In effect, the city is claiming some kind of proprietary ownership of your trash even before you throw it away. The city’s argument: The residents’ proprietary interest in their own trash is equal to the value of that trash. Trash, being trash, has zero such value, hence residents’ have no financial interest in their trash. The residents’ argument in their lawsuit (yes, of course there was a lawsuit): If there’s any money to be gotten by recycling, whether by the residents or by the city, then there’s value in them thar trash. Moreover, trash isn’t trash to begin with, until the owner decides it’s trash. The city has no business dictating what items the residents must throw away.
The court agreed that the only trash in this case was the city’s argument, and overthrew that law.
(It’s still the against the law to take any material once it’s been put out in the trash though. That wasn’t at issue here.)
I’ve done lots of dumpster dives (for work - I’m a security specialist and penetration tester, so I have a “get out of jail free” card every time). The things people throw in the trash is gob-smacking. At businesses, I find that it’s usually b/c “the trash can was closer than the shred bin.” In homes, it’s because people aren’t willing to spend $40 for a document shredder. (I only do dumpster-dive on businesses, FTR).
You can control what gets put out with your trash. My recommendation is the fluffy shredded stuff. It would surprise most how much information can be gleaned just by looking at “innocuous” litter. In my place, only junk mail (and not all of that, even) goes out un-shredded. To a prospective attacker with a fairly low level of skill, even knowing what magazines you subscribe to can present an attack vector.