Duke Energy not a big fan of shredders, decides utility bills a better fit for Dumpster?

We're not sure quite what it is about old utility bills that seems to get people so confused about what to do with them.

I mean, when the BCR household is done with bills or other material that has identifiable information about us on them, we throw 'em in the shredder. No fuss, no muss, no pesky account numbers or names floating unprotected in a landfill somewhere.

A couple of months ago, we noted that the City of Durham had been storing old utility bills in what apparently seemed like a logical place (to them): the Duke Park bathhouse structure, where they decided to allow time, moisture and heat to compost the bills into a kinda-gloppy but slow oblivion.

Say what you will about that little dust-up: at least the City kept 'em under lock and key, with the records seen only when the bathhouse was broken into.

Not so Duke Energy, it seems, which finds the open dumpster behind one of its payment centers to be a more public and convenient place to leave 'em, according to Durham über-crusader Bill Anderson and a videographer friend of his.

See the video beyond the jump - we've moved it off the front page since at least one IE user finds the embedded video crashes their Web browser.

Anderson and company earlier this year got catty over a similar bird-brained mistake by Petsmart, whose dumping of customer order records and even credit card authorizations unshredded out back of a store could have landed the retailer in some deep doggy doo-doo -- identity theft and customer record prevention fines from the state, that is.

Comments

[209]

WTF!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Myers Sugg]

Not that Duke Energy shouldn't have certain standards for their payment processors, but DE, PSNCENERGY, etc., no longer offer company run payment stations. I think Time Warner may still do their own, as does the City of Durham. Again, Duke Energy isn't totally blameless here, but whatever processor trashed unshredded bills in the dumpster should accept responsibility for this. Would the name of the establishment be inappropriate?

Myers

[G Wolf]

How do we know this was something the company did knowingly, and not just the work of an errant employee? I wouldn't be surprised if a Duke Energy employee had a plan with a friend to "conveniently drop" a bunch of these in a dumpster and have the friend pick it up later, with their intention being identity theft.

[Bryan Gilmer]

First of all, I'm actually a privacy advocate, but in this case, what's the big deal? It has a person's name and address, available in any telephone directory or other public database. I suppose you can also see how much power they used.

I can't imagine what use anyone would have for another person's Duke Power account number.

Bill Anderson in the video speculates "Socials?" as in Social Security numbers, but why would those be on someone's power bill? I doubt social security numbers were in the dumpster.

If there's full credit card numbers, expirys and so forth, then that's different. But they give no indication that's the case.

I'm mostly upset all that paper didn't get recycled.