Most people will go above and beyond when it comes to securing places like their homes, businesses, and other establishments, but for some reasons when it comes to personal identity security many are not as engaged. That’s where secure document destruction services come in.

Whether you’re the CEO of a major corporation or just your Average Joe (or Jane), you leave yourself open to direct theft, identity fraud, and other security breaches if you don’t take the time and effort shredding documents and secure document destruction. Approximately 57,868,922 records were put at risk for one reason or another in 2013 alone.

Finding a quality paper shredding company is one excellent way to go about secure document destruction, but you can also invest in a personal paper shredder to handle smaller needs. Regardless of what method you choose, here are three reasons every person needs to be aware and concerned about their sensitive/personal information and how it is destroyed.

1. Prevalence of Paper: Despite our reliance on technology and electronics in recent years, there is still an incredible amount of paper documents that are produced and distributed routinely across the country. In fact, the average office worker uses about 10,000 sheets of copy paper every year, and overall Americans use about four million tons annually. When you consider that 43% of security breaches are caused due to physical means such as dumpster diving, that’s a real problem if you don’t invest in secure document destruction.
2. Common Method of Identity Theft: As previously mentioned, paper documents are one of the primary methods criminals use to steal your identity and ultimately use it to fund their personal or criminal purchases. While there are more and more methods being invented every day to prevent identity fraud such as new security chips in credit cards, physical paper documents with credit card, birth, and other personal information will always be one of the easiest ways for your identity to be stolen.
3. Don’t Forget About e-Stuff: Even though paper documents are so important to have destroyed, paper shredding solutions are not the only secure document destruction you should engage in. Electronic documents need to be properly disposed of too after you’re done with them as hackers and even just people using your computer can get a hold of them pretty easily. This is why it’s not a good idea to leave passwords and account information saved onto computers and mobile devices.