The Terminator - Paper Shredders
Overview:
Identity theft, one of the most insidious forms of white-collar crime worldwide, occurs when swindlers steal your personal and/or financial information to use your credit cards, tap your bank accounts, get new credit in your name, file fraudulent tax returns, get cell phones in your name, access your insurance benefits, and so on. When these "pretenders" steal your private and/or financial information, your life becomes a living hell, particularly if you don't realize what has happened right away and the imposter siphons huge funds using your name. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) estimates the losses to businesses and financial institutions at nearly US $53 billion annually. Thus, it becomes all the more essential to adopt strategies for identity theft prevention. The foremost and most affordable ID theft prevention products are paper shredders.
Historical Facts:
A maverick inventor A. A. Low is accredited with having created the first paper shredder in 1908. However it wasn't until decades later in 1936, when a German named Adolf Ehinger, re-invented this design that people even knew such a device existed. Inspired by pasta-making machines, Adolf Ehinger marketed this "cutting-edge" product to security-conscious wartime governmental agencies and financial institutions, and soon his company EBA Maschinenfabrik became the leading manufacturer of paper shredders. These paper shredders also helped reduce bulk quantities of wartime waste paper and made disposal more manageable.
Current-Day:
The contemporary desktop paper shredder is a convenient and secure way of razing confidential documents, such as bank statements, credit card statements, medical records and other sensitive materials. The paper shredder not only destroys highly sensitive documents, but also helps with recycling scrap paper. Depending on your company's need, paper shredders are available with three different styles of cutting techniques. The least secure model is the single cut technique, which razes papers into elongated, thin vertical strips. More secure corporate models employ the crosscut technique, which cuts the documents into thin, tiny confetti-like squares by slicing both lengthwise and crosswise. The ultra-secure military-type model utilizes the ultra-secure cut, which offers a crosscut action that dices the document into microscopic, indecipherable shreds.
Summary:
As long as there is need for "for-your-eyes-only," confidential, limited distribution or secure documents, so to will there be a demand to obliterate them beyond the point of sensible reconstruction. The attention paid to annihilation and clearance techniques vary significantly with the need for document security, and the keenness to pay for it. Secure paper disposal is more often a matter of time and alertness than money. Accordingly, the self-effacing paper shredders have become permanent fixtures in environments where the need for secure waste disposal is relatively high.