How do I destroy old documents and protect my identity?

Paper goes in a bucket, credit gets frozen at all three bureaus, your email address gets checked against the breach list, and every transaction sends you a notification. Four pages, and the first one costs nothing.

Water destroys paper better than a shredder does. Water destroys paper better than a shredder does says the way people keep recommending is not a machine, it is a bucket: separate the sheets, soak them overnight, mash the lot into pulp. A shredder does not destroy a document; it converts one into a puzzle whose pieces are all still in the bag, and hand-reassembly of strip-shredded documents has actually been done. Pulp is not a puzzle. If you would rather buy something, read the number, not the adjective: shredder security is graded on a published P-scale, P-1 to P-7, and “diamond cut” or “confetti cut” are marketing phrases with no fixed definition. Before spending anything, a fair number of banks and some office supply shops will shred for free. For the daily trickle, tear it up and split the pieces between bins, because the threat is somebody going through one bag of your trash, not assembling a case. And do not run a marker over an original you must hand on; redact a photocopy. The page’s safety lines if you were about to burn it: no accelerant, check whether open burning is legal where you live, and no improvised chemistry. Old hard drives, phones and discs are a different problem entirely, and nothing on that page applies to them.

Freeze it at all three. Freeze it at all three is for after the breach letter: freeze your credit at all three nationwide bureaus, because five separate conversations say a freeze at one leaves the other two open; the three are separate companies and a lender chooses which one to check. Use the free freeze, not a paid lock, which two conversations say is the same door with a subscription attached. A freeze stops a lender who does not already have you as a customer from seeing your file, so no new account can be opened in your name, including by you until you lift it; it does not touch cards you already have. Since September 2018 federal law has made placing and lifting a freeze free at every bureau, and older accounts on the page saying otherwise were right when they wrote it. Then read the reports: five conversations say there is one website the law set up for free reports, annualcreditreport.com, and the sites that look like it trap you into a subscription. The friction is honest: a freeze adds steps to every legitimate application, and if you are mid-mortgage, do not open a dispute, because it makes the score unstable and lenders stop.

Check your email against the breach list. Check your email against the breach list says six separate conversations name the same first move: put your email address into a breach-checking service and see which known leaks it appears in, and often which password went with it. The page does not name the site, because the accounts argue three to three about typing an address into any such site, and their decider is the site’s standing, an established, widely known service against an unknown one; the page’s own line is type an address, never a password. Three conversations say the leak is not the danger, the reuse is: a leaked pair is tried against every other site. So the order of work is the email account first, because whoever holds your mail can reset the rest, then every account that shared the leaked password, each given its own, then two-step verification on the email account. One correction there: a text telling you someone has signed in is not two-step verification.

Turn on every alert. Turn on every alert says the best defence against both card fraud and the subscription you forgot is a free setting: notifications for every transaction, with the threshold as low as your bank allows. Not amounts over fifty. Every one. The counterintuitive part is why: an unexplained charge of a dollar or two is frequently a test of whether a stolen card number is still live before anything larger is tried, and any sensible-sounding threshold sits above it. The page’s own block at the top: if credit is a trap for you, skip its credit-card paragraphs, because the move that does the most is the free setting on any account you already have.

Who this is not for. The freeze page says if you live outside the US, the freeze as described does not exist in most of Canada and it does not know your country’s rules; and if the fraud you fear is on a card you already hold, the freeze is not the tool, the issuer is. The breach page says if what worries you is a partner reading your email, that is about the relationship rather than the password, and it does not carry that; and if someone is already using your exposed details against you, the police and the platform are the places.