Disposing Personal Info
One Town Buries it in a Park
By Daniel Muniz

For the past several years, awareness of identity theft in this country has tremendously increased. More people are now careful of how they dispose of their personal information because it is ridiculously easy for any shady character to steal your identity in order to fraudulently wipe out your bank account or to open a credit card under your name for an illicit spending spree. In addition, there are also millions of illegal aliens who purchase stolen identities so that they can impersonate someone else for employment purposes.

However, the more safeguards people employ to protect their personal records, the more secure their identity can be.

Unfortunately, the weakest link in a chain has always been the entities that already have your confidential information.

Sadly, a lot of people must go on blind faith when it comes to third parties. The general population simply has to trust that the public governments and the private organizations that they deal with will maintain strict internal controls and effective policies. And they must also assume that these entities will behave in a responsible manner in doing everything possible to secure their personal records from mischief and theft. And more importantly, one must hope that these third parties are also properly disposing of your information when the need arises.

Consumers can only do so much on their own accord to protect their identity but they are completely helpless when someone else has their sensitive information.

Regrettably, that weak link became blatantly obvious when the city of Converse, a suburb of San Antonio Texas, was publicly exposed by a local television news station in its practice of disposing huge batches of confidential personal records by burying them in a public park. The city records included personal data like social security numbers, driver’s license numbers, addresses, phone numbers, photographs, and other identifying details.

Some of the buried police files even included tickets for littering.

Unbeknownst to city residents and to anyone else who has had business with Converse such as traffic tickets, taxes, contracts, etc, this municipality simply digs a hole in the ground of the public property that it owns and buries its discarded records in it. And they have been doing this for quite a number of years.

But what is shocking is that it was perfectly legal for them to do so since those records are prior to 1998 which was when the state began to enact more stringent privacy laws that required the secure disposal of such data.

Common sense would dictate that all this sensitive information should have been burned or shredded but it wasn’t.

At least these files were not dumped in a public landfill but it is still rather reckless for city officials to believe in the “out of sight, out of mind” concept for getting rid of those records.

First and foremost, solid waste experts have already discovered that landfills are not necessarily bio-degradable. Numerous in-depth studies about antiquated landfills that are a century or older revealed that much of the trash that was excavated for their research happened to be in pristine condition. It was concluded that a lot of garbage didn’t actually decompose. Instead, it was mummified.

However, Converse city leaders simply thought that once these private records were buried, no one would ever discover them; or at least not in their lifetime.

Wrong!

The city hired a contractor to do some flood control work at one of their parks. Lo and behold, it didn’t take long for the crew to inadvertently dig up a treasure trove of forgotten personal information.

It would be ridiculously easy for an identity thief abscond with a multitude of identities.

A local television station interviewed an embarrassed city manager who didn’t want to go in front of news cameras but did confess that no one ever thought that somebody would dig this stuff up. And the bureaucrat also admitted that the city didn’t know how legal it was to bury it in the first place.

And to add insult to injury, all the city of Converse did was simply move the same dug up records to another city park in which a different work crew dug another hole to bury it again.

But by this time, the state of Texas got involved. Naturally, the state was incensed because a local municipality was making it owns personal landfills without any oversight.

Also, many local residents were outraged of the carelessness of their city government.

However, an incident like this vividly illustrates how tenuous the security of confidential information really is. You can do your part to properly dispose of your personal records but heaven only knows what everybody else does with it.

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