Real Estate Agents beware… the information you collect is quite valuable AND you have certain obligations under new Privacy Laws.
We usually discuss the risks of disposing confidential information with general waste or with paper destined for recycling. Criminals use this information for identity theft, your business’ competition may use it to sabotage prospective contracts or opponents against you to benefit their agendas. Genevieve Toop of Adelaide Real Estate Agency Toop & Toop recently discussed the incentives now being offered by online and data-capturing companies.
Let’s take it a step further … the real estate industry collects a lot of information about prospective clients (buyers and sellers). Confidential information is collected every time a prospective buyer enters an open home. Just by doing that, criminals can piece together information about your identity. They’ll find contact details, financial status, existing investments, your interest level, your ‘profile’, the home’s listing price, suburb and over time a criminal can piece together the number of houses you visit.
Under the new Privacy Laws the information collected must be relevant and they must disclose how they will use that information. Once taken it is their responsibility to store it securely and when it is no longer required, destroy or de-identify this personal information. By the way, Shred-X specialises in the destruction of confidential information.
In her article Genevieve discusses the value of the data that they handle. She explains that “[Third parties want] information so badly, that they are now offering real estate agencies incentives, including preferential agent profiling along with substantial payments, to those who will supply it to them.” Even if no names are passed between these parties a shrewd criminal could use the information collected on the open home register with contract information to piece together enough information to secure a home loan in a your name. Scary stuff!
We are sure that commentary on this emerging trend will continue to evolve. The Privacy Act 1988 defines personal information as:
…information or an opinion, whether true or not, and whether recorded in a material form or not, about an identified individual, or an individual who is reasonably identifiable.
Read the full article on the Real Estate Business website.
For nearly 15 years Shred-X Document Destruction has been the leader in secure destruction services. We assist organisations in complying with the Privacy Act 1988 and its Amendments providing tailored services to thousands of commercial sites and households across Australia. Our NAID AAA Accredited Destruction Facility in Wingfield services Adelaide and the surrounding regional areas on a regular basis.
In addition to destroying documents we also degauss data on hard drives and offer physical destruction of e waste, a more secure alternative to computer recycling.