security begins at home

Peter

I've just finished reading a short article on identity theft and it does make for alarming reading.

The survey, by Capital One, claims that 2.5m of us throw bank statements into the bin (intact) and 14m of us don't bother to shred personal information.

Yet at the same time 82% of us, according to the Information Commissioners Office, are aware that personal information should be protected. So if ID theft is on the increase, awareness is on the increase what's stopping us all protecting ourselves?

If we go back a few years to when e-commerce really took off we were led to believe that criminals were just waiting to pluck your credit card details out of the ether. While that was never the issue (it's always been more about the storage security)it does seem now that our household bins rather than the recycle bins of our PC are the main target for criminals.

How about bio-degradable statements if we have to have paper based communications?