by J Gray

Created on: January 15, 2009

Introduction:

Many people forget the importance of paper documents. There is a lot of information stored in paper documents that many people forget about. The purpose of this article is to explain the importance of paper documents for a person looking to violate your privacy and the importance of destroying paper documents to maintain your privacy. At the end of this article you should be able to identify paper documents in your residence and/or office. You should also be able to properly destroy paper documents in your residence and/or office to maintain your privacy.

Who Wants Your Documents:

One of the main reasons that people do not take the steps to properly destroy paper documents is that most people do not know what is important or not. To fully understand what is important one needs to think like the enemy. In this case the enemy is someone who is trying to invade your privacy. There are many types of people who try to invade your privacy:
Advertising Companies
Social Engineers
Identity Thieves

That is not a complete list of people who would want to invade your privacy but it works as an example. Now we need to think the people above:

Advertising Companies are interested in selling products and there is a lot of things in your normal trash that will tell them what they need to try and sell to you. One of the best examples of advertising is Google. Google has made a successful business through advertising because Google shows ads that are like what people are looking for when they search. Keeping this in mind it makes sense for advertising companies to want to know what you are already buying because that will tell them what offers to send to you. Now what type of documents do you throw away that can tell these companies what you already buy? Receipts and packing or shipping lists are just two examples. Shipping lists are a double danger because they tell people what type of things you purchase and they have both your name and address in one record.

Social Engineers are people who attempt to talk to you into give them personal or private information that helps them in their task. Their task can be different things, some may be attempting to access a computer system or maybe steal an employee from your company. A Social Engineer could even go further and become an Identify Thief or a Stalker. A Social Engineer is able to gather information easier if the Social Engineer has personal information to make them sound more believable. Would you be more willing to

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