Why is it important to shred documents?
In today’s world, every business collects and maintains sensitive information. Although many businesses are making the shift to storing data electronically, there are still many businesses that store paper files. If you’re one of those businesses, you may be wondering what to do with those important documents when they’re no longer needed. Customer lists, payroll records, credit card receipts, etc.
Document Shredding is one of the most important ways to protect yourself and your business from identity theft, corporate espionage or potentially embarrassing leaks of information from your business.
Any documents with personal details on them can be used by someone to steal an identity. If you don’t shred your documents before you throw them out, identity thieves can use those details to sign up for things like credit cards or passports under a stolen persona.
When an organisation has collected personal information, it may need to destroy or delete it after certain periods of time. This is because there are privacy laws that require this to be done. If someone’s privacy could get violated by keeping their data or information around longer than needed in your workspace the repercussions can be detrimental to your business
Below you can find all the data destruction laws and retention requirements in Australia
Nowadays, we are facing a big problem with the rise of personal information theft, statistics about personal fraud, include card fraud, identity theft, and scams (phishing, romance, computer support, financial advice and more).
An estimated 11% of Australians aged 15 years and over (2.1 million) experienced personal fraud in 2020-21. This was higher than the rate in 2014-15 (8.5%).
In the five years prior to the survey, an estimated 2.8% of persons (570,900) experienced identity theft. The majority (93% or 529,600) reported their most recent incident to authorities, most commonly a bank or financial institution (71%)
https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/people/crime-and-justice/personal-fraud/latest-release
