If you are a small business in the Bucks County or Greater Philadelphia Area, you know the importance of shredding confidential information regarding your employees, customers, and/or clients. You need to shred documents and electronic memory devices not just to free up space, but to follow laws that compel you to protect the privacy of others. You may have a document shredder in your office. Is it up to the job?
What Must You Do?
For healthcare providers, health insurers, and their contractors, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) requires that paper records with protected health information be shredded, burned, pulped, or pulverized so the information is rendered unreadable, indecipherable, and cannot be reconstructed, according to the US Department of Health and Human Services.
The federal Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act reformed the financial services industry (including banks) and addressed concerns about consumer financial privacy, according to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). They also state risks to consumers’ personal information stored on paper can be avoided by burning, shredding, or pulverizing documents to make them unreadable.
For both industries, personal information on electronic devices can be obtained not just by computer hacking, but by getting physical possession of the hardware. Shredding those devices once their useful lives end eliminates that risk.
Is Your Office Shredder Up to the Task?
You need a machine that makes the material unreadable. That’s harder than you might imagine.
Before the US embassy was taken over by Iranian revolutionaries in 1979, CIA agents ran documents through their shredders. They ended up with piles of narrow strips of paper, which, after a lot of time and effort, were put back together, reports the BBC. More than 40 years have passed and instead of meticulously piecing together paper strips by hand for weeks or months, you can use software that may do the same after the strips are digitally imaged in seconds or minutes.
What Do You Do With Your Shredded Material?
Given the availability of reconstruction software, it’s not just how well material is shredded, but what you do with it afterward. Are you just putting it in a dumpster anyone could open and access? If you recycle the paper from your office, there’s a good chance they won’t take shredded paper because it can’t be sorted.
After we shred your documents the material, along with that from other clients, is taken to a recycling center. Shredded papers are stored securely while we have them, mixed in with shreds from other customers, and brought to a recycler who’ll use them to create new paper products. Original documents can’t be recreated with the shreds we produce. That may not be true of what comes out of your machine.
Prevent Leaks of Protected Information by Using TITAN Mobile Shredding
If you have any questions about how we can shred records that you want to be destroyed, please call us at (866) 848-2699. We can discuss your needs and how we can meet them.
