Consumer privacy has become such a serious issue that state and federal legislation has been enacted to protect our privacy.  There are several laws that require businesses to destroy rather than simply discard personal information.

Assembly Bill 2246 went into effect in January of 2001 with the following mandate:

“A business shall take all reasonable steps to destroy or arrange for the destruction of a customer’s records within its custody or control containing personal information which is no longer to be retained by the business by (1) shredding, (2) erasing, or (3) otherwise modifying the personal information in those records to make it unreadable or undecipherable through any means.”

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 is one of the first and most well know of the laws.  Security standards were set that establish measures to ensure the security of healthcare information maintained by healthcare providers, healthcare institutions as well as health insurance companies.  This information must be properly destroyed by shredding, as burning is illegal in California.

Also known as the GLB Act places significant restrictions on the use of customer information by those in the financial industry (insurance, banks, securities, mortgage, escrow, lenders, etc.)  Such financial institutions must disclose their privacy policies to their customers.

The Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act establishes a national system of fraud detection so victims can alert all three major credit rating agencies with a single phone call.  Starting June 1, 2005, employers must destroy personal information about their employees before they throw it out if they obtained the information from a credit report.