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Embrace the shredder to keep a shred of privacy
© St. Petersburg Times Afew weeks ago I was cleaning out a drawer when I came across an old journal I had kept during a painful time in my life. Paging through it, nostalgically for the most part, I was slightly alarmed at times reading things I had written when I thought I was doing better than I was. I held a piece of the living past in my hands, appreciated it for what it was, felt the texture of the paper and read the frantic loops and whorls of what, for me, passes for handwriting. And then I tore it up. I tore it into small pieces, which I then scattered through two bags of wet garbage, and consigned it to a landfill where anyone who thinks it might be worth the effort can go dig it up. Some private lives should be committed to paper. Some, especially those that are more interesting, shouldn't. And with the expectation of privacy shrinking daily, we should probably all be thinking about how to protect ourselves and those close to us. This chain of thought is occasioned by the apparent inability of a good many folks to know when and where to use paper shredders or other appropriate disposal techniques for documents. The folks at Arthur Andersen were apparently too enthusiastic about using their shredders. Employees at some offices of the Florida Department of Children and Families apparently don't get around to using theirs often enough. And a Forest Service technician in Colorado would have done much better to invest $69 in shredder (I found them online at that price) than to burn down half of her state while disposing of a letter from her estranged husband -- or so she says. Like it or not, I think we could train ourselves to take the same satisfaction from the hum of a shredder or the whirring of a garbage disposal that we take in torching old love letters. And, in an allegedly paperless society, shredding still remains a major business. There are companies you can hire to come to your office or plant and do nothing but shred documents. Maybe Jeb needs to look into privatizing that part of state government. The information superhighway of the electronic age -- even if, as I do, you live in an undeveloped cul-de-sac -- means there is even more of our personal information lying around in the form of electronic impulses than there has been in printed form, and we are, almost daily, presented with reminders that it isn't kept nearly as private as we are promised that it is. We were once told that people could protect their privacy by keeping their Social Security numbers out of the wrong hands. But the truth is, the same number was used as my library card number at Pasco Hernando Community College 25 years ago, people who take professional continuing education classes are often asked to list it on sign-in sheets that are then passed on to the rest of the class, and I have recently been told I had to provide it to get married and to get cable television service. We should be just as, or more, cautious about the handling of electronic information as we are printed information and should all learn early on that using the "delete" key on a computer doesn't delete anything. Having your hard-drive wiped to get rid of old love letters may not be as emotionally satisfying as finding closure in a fire-pit surrounded by dry brush. I know this argument sounds bizarre from someone who has earned much of his living over the past 30 years gathering and revealing information about people who frequently would rather that it remained hidden. But most of what I have written about has been public record, and I have never had to lie or steal or go through someone's garbage to find out what I needed to know. (I did have to learn how to read upside-down while standing in front of public officials' and sometimes editors' desks -- but that is allowable.) But some things in our society are designed to be and remain confidential because that confidentiality, properly granted and protected, provides for a greater public good. Shredding documents isn't rocket science and shouldn't be that hard to accomplish. But, then, we haven't looked in NASA's Dumpsters lately, have we?
 © 2006 • All Rights Reserved • St. Petersburg Times
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Times columns today Howard Troxler Jan Glidewell Gary Shelton Ernest Hooper From the Times North Suncoast desks Editorial |
