Customers want to do business with businesses they can trust. Since most businesses will ultimately gather some sort of confidential information about their customers, employing some form of data shredding is a necessary step to take to prevent having the confidentiality of customer information or databases stolen for some unauthorised purpose. One of the main ways that data shredding benefits any business is by instilling confidence in the customer that the business is serious about protecting any and all confidential information that a customer may need to share with the business in the course of doing business.
Legally, both customers as well as employees have the right to have the information they share with the company protected from being stolen for identity theft or viewed by any other individual or business that did not originally require the sensitive information to be collected. This can include but is not limited to such information as National Insurance numbers, bank account and credit card numbers, CVs, creative ideas and confidential business contracts regarding bids and sales quotes. Simply throwing away old information into the trash or the dumpster behind the office building rather than properly handling its disposal by shredding it could make valuable information available to anyone digging through the trash, putting the company as well as its customers and employees at risk of identity theft. Any business that does not properly dispose of its collected confidential information may face litigation over the fact that it allowed sensitive information to wind up in the wrong hands.
Every business over the course of time collects information about business activity that includes such things as lists of current and past customers along with sensitive billing data or financial information, letters and memos related to sales activities and business proposals, annual sales statistics and other data that could prove destructive to the company’s profitability if obtained by a competitor. Ensuring that all of this information when no longer needed is properly disposed of through the shredding process protects both the company and its customers and employees.
Data shredding is an activity that should not be left to chance in order to do it properly for everyone’s protection. If a business hires a service specialising in shredding of sensitive data that is no longer needed, they should be sure to deal with a firm that provides a certificate of destruction so that they are legally covered should either a customer or former employee bring legal action that their information was obtained by another party due to the company’s negligence at shredding old data.
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Felicity is a intermittent columnist, writing infrequent columns in the UK about business security and data protection matters. To discover more about data destruction services as well as paper, mobile data shredding and confidential document shredding, then please visit our site for a complete range of our business shredding services.
Source: http://www.articletrader.com
