Time to Buy a Shredder

A front page story in today’s Lowell Sun reminds us that an important provision of the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act (FACTA) goes into effect tomorrow. This law mandates that “any person who maintains or otherwise possesses consumer information for a business purpose” must destroy this information before it is discarded. The proper way to destroy such information is by “burning, pulverizing or shredding.” FACTA says that “consumer information” includes, but is not limited to “social security numbers, driver’s license numbers, phone numbers, physical address, and e-mail address.” The penalty for violating this law is up to $1000 per violation plus liability to the effected person for his actual damages. Alright, I have to confess that prior to reading today’s newspaper, I had never heard of this and, if you’re a regular blog reader, you know that I try to stay up to date on these type of privacy matters. (If I had heard of it before today, I might have bought some stock in a shredder company). What are the practical implications of this law? If a “consumer” sends us a letter at the registry and the envelope bears the consumer’s name and physical address (i.e., his home address), I can no longer just throw that envelope in the trash: I have to “burn, pulverize or shred” it. Same thing with an in-bound e-mail that contains the sender's e-mail address. If I print it, I can’t throw it away without shredding it first. A long, long time ago in a prior career, I was a “top secret document custodian” and it was a tough job. Everything had to be shredded and then the shredded paper had to be burned. It took a significant amount of effort just to throw something away. As of tomorrow, it seems that all of us will have to put a similar amount of effort into destroying papers that we have always just thrown in the trash. For the record, the registry bought its first shredder more than a year ago to handle employee-related paperwork that was to be thrown away. It looks like the usage of this machine will be increasing significantly.