Keeping Your Personal Information Safe |
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| Author:
| Doeycall
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| Submitted: |
13-Jul-2004 22:06:51 |
| Imported From: |
zZine (original author: Doeycall)
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| The one thing that we all have in common, is the fact that we need to keep our personal information safe, especially when we are throwing it away.
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Keeping Your Personal Information Safe
By: Doeycall
The one thing that
we all have in common, is the fact that we need to keep our personal
information safe, especially when we are throwing it away. Most people just
absent mindedly crumple up the piece of paper that their name, address,
phone number, and credit card number is on, and toss it into the trash.
THAT IS NOT SAFE! Anyone who happens to go looking through your trash at
night could easily find that piece of paper, and ruin your life. This is
especially dangerous if you live in an apartment complex that has a
community dumpster. Any of your neighbors or even a total stranger could
get into that dumpster and discover your personal information.
There are
a few ways you could go about keeping this information safe. The first way
would be to not throw out any records that hold vital personal information
(i.e. credit card numbers, social security numbers, etc.) and put them all
into a safe.
The second way, and probably the best way to destroy this
information, would be to burn it all. Now, this would become tricky as most
cities have fire codes against this.
The third way, and the most cost
effective, and safest as far as not catching you or your house on fire
goes, is by purchasing a shredder. Now you are probably saying to yourself,
"I've been at stores before that sell shredders, but there are so many
different ones to choose from. I'm not sure what to go with." Don't
worry, this article will help you choose the best one for you.
First
off, there are two types of shredders, strip-cut and cross-cut. I will tell
you right now that you do not want to buy a strip-cut. Strip-cut shredders
will just cut the paper into strips that can easily be glued or taped back
together. Once again, anyone snooping through your trash could find these
strips and steal your information.
Cross-cut, unlike its strip-cut
counter part, will turn whatever you send through it into confetti. By
putting it into that small of pieces and putting a few blank sheets of
paper in with it and mixing it up, it would take a person months if not
years to find all of the pieces needed and then put them together in the
right order.
Now that we have decided on the type of
shredder(cross-cut), we can now move on to a few other factors:
How much
will you be shredding a day?
And how much you are willing to
spend?
Let us look at these two questions for a moment. If you are just
the average person like me, you would be lucky to shred more than three
pages a week, except when you are bored and feel like playing with the
shredder. In this case, you could look at a cheaper line of shredders and
get something that is recommended to handle one to ten pages per day.
If
you work at home, you might want to go a step up from this and grab one
that is recommended for doing ten to thirty pages a day. This upgrade will
cost you approximately $10 - $15 depending on the brand of shredder sold at
your favorite office supply store and whether or not you can catch it on
sale.
Finally, if you work for, or own a large business and have a large
number of sensitive documents, you shoulder consider looking at one in the
price range of $100 or more.
I hope that this article has helped you
decide what would be best to keep your personal information safe when
disposing of it. My next article, coming out soon, will be on how to keep
your information safe on the computer using two different programs for
encryption.
Edited by PJD
This article was originally published by CyberArmy.net in the CyberArmy Library.
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