There’s a drawer in my laundry room with all the documents that no one must ever see: old tax returns, W-2s, checks deposited via my phone apps, outdated passports, kids’ school records, yellowed contracts and more. When the drawer gets full, I put all the contents  in a Trader Joe’s bag and take it to my local, family-owned mailing store for a guy named Jeff, who delightfully remembers my name, to shred, paying $1 per pound. 

It’s always seemed like a good system, but I was spooked recently when one of the cyber-security experts I have interviewed while writing about privacy issues the past couple years told me what happens to documents that I (and perhaps you) dispose of this way: Many mailing stores put those reams of paper in a plastic bin with a cheap lock, then wait a while until they get a full truckload’s worth and haul it off to a facility to destroy. While I’m not storing state secrets near my washer-dryer, the fact that more than 1.4 million reports of identity theft were received by the Federal Trade Commission last year, as The Wall Street Journal newsroom has reported, makes me more than a little concerned.

Sure, I could purchase a home shredder, but I have yet to find one that blends with my extreme-Brutalist (read: don’t set anything on that side table or it will break) apartment design. A clunky machine and its unsightly refuse would never feel right in my austere home.

Which is why I was intrigued to learn that friend-of-a-friend pro organizer Lisa Zaslow is a big fan of the tiny Miseyo Wide Roller Stamp Identity Theft Stamp. I get it: How many identity-theft prevention devices can you call truly adorable? Well, this one, which stamps overlapping letters across your documents as you roll it, and has a tiny cartridge that can be refilled infinite times through a little side hole. I ordered mine in yellow and my 13-year-old daughter and I set about protecting our privacy one afternoon. 

Her teen hands easily gripped the stamp, which reminded me of all those summer evenings labeling her shorts and swimsuits before camp. When she rolled the manual device over a bill from a vacation in Puerto Rico, the wheel slipped satisfyingly across the 8- by 11-inch sheet of paper. It’s important to note that after just one roll across the document, my meticulous offspring shined an iPhone flashlight on the bill and you could squint and still make out the daily purchases of virgin daiquiris and poolside nachos. But a second quick pass and the rich, black “confidential” and now other jumbled letters the stamp prints did the trick of hiding our information. 

The gliding feeling was so gratifying, I lost a mindless hour rolling over tax returns from 2015 and sundry payment stubs, credit card bills and boarding passes while listening to a novel on Audible. By the end of two chapters, I had gotten through a year’s worth of semi-confidential papers. I threw them in a clear blue bag, tossed them in the recycling bin on my floor and went to bed without even considering a trip to the mailing store. The laundry room drawer is now blessedly empty. 

I enjoyed it so much, I watched the Miseyo Identity Theft Protection Roller Stamp video, which says it unfurls about 100 meters of ink, and refills are cheap (three for $10.99). You can roll the 2.36- by 1.22-inch device across the labels on prescription bottles, too. I recommend using it on a desk or table rather than the comfort of your bedroom comforter, as it takes a few seconds for the ink to fully dry, but I’m sold on this smooth security method. It also comes in eight colors.

I’ll miss seeing Jeff, but not dragging that heavy bag to my car and worrying how long it will take for my documents to be destroyed. Now my only concern is not misplacing this tiny security tool; I have long since lost track of that summer-camp stamp bearing my last name.

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