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I shred my screwed up tax returns and anything with SSN. I'm generally not a tin-foil hat wearer, but is it prudent to shred register receipts? Anything else?

• mschuster91 9y ago
  > but is it prudent to shred register receipts? I'd say so. First, it makes life more difficult for an attacker who does want to recover sensitive documents (simply: there's a lot more noise from the receipt shreds), and purchase patterns tell a lot about you - in 2012, for example, Target got flak for finding out a girl was pregnant before the girl herself did (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.h...)... for example while you may decide to take all your whiskey bottles to the recycler, when I see weekly purchases of a dozen Jack Daniels bottles I can assume either you are a heavy drinker, or your family likes to heavily drink. Both stuff I could use as extortion leverage. I prefer to drop the receipts in the store as I leave the property unless there's something on the receipt on which I might want/need warranty worth more than 50€ - it's not tied to me, the store and anyone present at the property can see what I bought anyway and as I like to pay cash for most things now I don't leave any data in big-data analysis companies which match purchases with my DC account data...