On Scanning Your Signature

Several people have commented that scanning your signature is a bad idea because if someone got a hold of the file they could sign away everything you own.  Obviously you should keep the file private. I wouldn’t recommend attaching it to each of your emails or putting it on a web page or anything like that, but it is probably no more risky than anything else you do on a regular basis.

Consider the following:

1. If you ever write a check or sign a credit card receipt at a store, you are essentially handing a stranger a copy of your signature already.  They could easily digitize it using the process I’ve just shown and use to sign things as you.
2. Most of the time when you sign something, does anyone verify that it is indeed your signature?  Most stores don’t even verify that your signature matches the back of a credit card.  Someone could just as easily sign something as you using their own handwriting and it would probably slip through just fine.  If you apply for a credit card, they aren’t verifying your signature against anything.  If someone wants to get a credit card in your name, they aren’t going to need your signature to do it.
3. Anything important is going to require more than just a signature.  If you buy a house or something like that, they are going to require a notarized signature.  That means that someone verified you are who you say before sign the document.

I’m not saying that someone getting your signature couldn’t prove to be inconvenient, but I can’t think of much someone could do that they couldn’t do already.  Especially because most people’s signatures are widely distributed already and it wouldn’t take much effort to get a copy.

Paper that wants to be Shredded

Someone sent me this video of paper that wants to be shredded.

It reminded me of a client of mine. I was coming in to do some consulting so I asked for a copy of their organizational chart to get a better idea of how everything was organized. I carried it around with me throughout their facility for about a week as a reference. Often I’d set it down on a table or desk while talking with an employee.

When I really started looking at it in detail, I discovered that it had the salaries of all the executive level staff penciled in under their names! While it wasn’t a problem for me to know their salaries, they should have at least warned me about the additional information.

Shred Everything

Even before I started my paperless office experiment, I purchased a shredder. The about the amount of private information on the paper I was throwing out started to concern me when I realized that I had no idea where most of it was going.

The novelty of turning every random scrap of paper kept my normal waste basket empty for the first week. After this fascination wore off I started asking myself “Do I really need to shred this?”

Surprisingly most of the time I found it was better to shred pretty much anything that came in the mail. Flyers and other mail that gets sent to everyone is spared from shredding, but most of the junk mail goes into the shredder. Here is some of my reasoning for some particular items:

• Fund raising letter from alma mater. I initially put it in the trash, but then dug it out and reduced it to confetti. I have seen some institutions ask you for the name of your college as part of a verification process, so if someone was digging through the trash to locate personal information there is a chance it could be used to gain access to other private information.
• Envelopes of financial statements. Obviously I filed or shredded the actual statements, but the envelopes themselves could give an identity thief a good idea about where to start looking.
• Extended warranty information for my car. Since it identified my vehicle, I figured it could be used pieced together with other information to cause mischief.

Obviously this is being a little on the paranoid side of things, but if you get a decent shredder, the cost of shredding as opposed to trashing a piece of paper is minimal. In fact it might be less because finely shredded material takes up less space than a can full of trash so you don’t have to empty it as often.

One of the biggest mistakes people make in getting a shredder is buying a machine that is too small for their needs. For me personally, if I can’t take a credit card offer and reduce the entire thing into bits of paper without even opening the envelope, the shredder isn’t powerful enough. That means shredding all the paper and any fake plastic credit card they sent with the offer. If you have to manually run paper through it one or two sheets at a time, you’ve really messed up your workflow and made it much slower than what you had with a trash can.

I think my chances for identity theft from someone digging through my trash are probably very low based on where I live. But it is possible that as identity thieves become more sophisticated the probability may go up. The less information about me that has gone out through the trash and sits who-knows-where the better.