Legal Considerations

Privacy Legislation

  • Avoid increasingly aggresive state and federal sanctions by securely shredding all confidential information.
  • With identity theft and corporate espionage as the fastest growing forms of fraud, General Shredding’s secure destruction solutions are vital to your company’s reputation and bottom line.

All businesses must comply with laws designed to protect individual and customer privacy or face increasingly aggresive sanctions, including:

Fair and Accurate Transaction Act (FACTA)
FACTA was designed to reduce the risk of consumer fraud and identity theft. FACTA applies to any person or company that possesses or handles personal information utilized for a business purpose. This includes:

  • Consumer reporting agencies
  • Resellers of consumer reports
  • Lenders
  • Insurers
  • Auto dealers
  • Government agencies
  • Mortgage brokers

Healthcare Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)
HIPAA requires healthcare organizations to maintain reasonable and appropriate technical and physical safeguards to prevent intentional or unintentional use or disclosure of protected health information. Protected information includes patient medical records, patient logs, insurance, billing and other personally identifiable health information.

Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA)
GLBA requires financial institutions to protect the privacy of consumer information and requires companies to give privacy notices that detail information sharing practices.

The Economic Espionage Act
The EEA protects company trade secrets which includes all forms and types of financial, business, scientific, technical, economic, and engineering information, if the owner has taken reasonable measures to keep such information private and not accessible to the public.

The Patriot Act
The Patriot Act places specific requirements on companies to ensure they have procedures for identifying customer account information, the ability to verify customer identity, and maintain records of information used to verify identity.

Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX)
SOX introduced stringent new rules with the stated objective: “to protect investors by improving the accuracy and reliability of corporate disclosures made pursuant to the securities law.”