What do doctors, lawyers, insurers, banks, the police, most businesses and all taxpayers have in common? According to Chris Akers of Iron Mountain, they're all targets for data theft.
"Consumers need to look at an overall responsibility strategy, really being confident of the fact that there are bad guys out there, and they'll use stolen data to their financial advantage," he said.
As long as there are identify thieves, there will be a market for document destruction, said Sam Bicking, owner of Docu-Shred. After selling his company in 2001, Mr. Bicking has recently returned to an industry that once consisted of a single shredding truck in the Chattanooga area.
"In 1995 we had one truck in town doing the shredding, and people would come up to me and say 'I don't think Chattanooga is ever going to be able to support a truck like that,'" he said. "Today there are about 15 trucks in town and I still don't think the market is saturated."
In fact, despite the advent of the digital "paperless" society, the need to shred paper records has increased on par with the increasing sophistication of identity thieves as well as emerging consumer privacy legislation.
Yet reports have recently emerged that identity thieves have begun to target discarded or resold copy machine hard drives and other sources of private information since they are often overlooked, and shredding companies have begun raising the issue of electronic waste disposal with customers and prospects.
"We never saw that before, but it's very common now," Mr. Bicking said. "Customers are becoming aware, more than they used to be, of the need to sanitize any electronics that leave the door."
Most shredding companies use cross-shredding diamond cut machines that make it all but impossible for determined thieves to reassemble a paper document. In an extra layer of safety, shredded documents are dropped off directly at recycling centers to be turned back into pulp.
Electronic waste must be handled more carefully because of the toxic nature of some components and the ability of old devices to damage many shredding machines.
Peace of mind isn't the only selling point for companies like Docu-Shred. Giving employees back their productivity is the real advantage, Mr. Bicking said.
"The people at a typical business are not paid to be shredders; they're accountants, managers or secretaries." he said. "If you free them up from shredding, even if it's only 30 minutes a day, they can invest more time in what they do well, what they prefer to do, and what makes their organization more productive."
Dana Howard of Shred-It said most larger shredding companies offer onsite document destruction to allow verification of their work. Sometimes the traditional method -- removing sensitive records elsewhere to be destroyed later -- just isn't enough.
"Our guys put it in physically by hand, and the shredder is an open shredder so there's a window in the back of our truck where the customer can look in and see their documents bring destroyed," Mr. Howard said.
This level of transparency, along with a signed certificate of destruction, satisfies legal requirements for sensitive documents like patient records, he said. Along with background and credit checks of each employee employed by the company, these methods establish trust with customers.
"If our driver loses track of even one sheet of paper, he's gone," Mr. Howard said.