Navigating Indiana’s Dumpster Diving Laws for IT Contractors

As you know our business model is putting you in contact with employers who need you to accomplish their IT-related tasks. We accomplish that by having you tell us what your skills are, then putting you in contact with employers who are looking for your skills. It’s a simple model and it works very simply with an automated process, one that requires no human administrator staff. That’s why no one else can offer you a way to work instantly any time of the day or night, and no one else can give you a tool that saves you time by letting you hire yourself as soon as you find an opportunity that matches your skill set. We’re not here to match skills to employers, we’re here to match skills to opportunities.

There are laws that govern certain types of computer networking activities. This is a fact of life. For example, the California Uber drivers are currently in the midst of some litigation over the question of whether the Uber company has to follow California’s labor laws, which are notably different from those of other states. These laws, these rules, these regulations, they’re not going to affect a normal IT contractor doing a data backup or processor migration. What you have to focus on is whether you can do what you’re going to do and pay your customer’s expectations if you get found out. You don’t need to think about whether the activity you’re being told not to do by someone who’s not the owner of the company doing that activity is actually illegal, you need to think about whether the owner of the company would still hire you if they found out you did that thing they didn’t want you to do.

But this is a process that you cannot avoid. You cannot legally hire an employee or subcontractor in a state if that activity is illegal in that state. So you have to know what the local laws are. For example, there’s a question in Indiana about whether the legality of dumpster diving is clear. Being “data driven” as we are, we’ve been talking a lot of our Bench Direct clients about www.databaserepair.net/indiana-junk-diving-laws-explained-legal-interpretations-and-implications/.

That’s right, we’re talking about dumpster diving in Indiana. The dumpster diving is an activity that we’ve already seen people who were in the wrong place and/or the wrong time charged with a crime that did not have malicious intent but was nonetheless used as an opportunity to make examples of them and teach the lesson of not getting involved in illegal activity. Dumpster diving, by the way, is going into the dumpsters in the back of stores, recycling centers, salvage yards, industrial areas, hospital neighborhoods, doctor’s offices, clinics and so forth to collect items that are otherwise disposed of: computers, servers, printers, backup tapes, hard drives, telephones, anything with data on it. Some of those items come out of the trash and are at least subject to the dumpster diving laws.

Normally dumpster diving is not a crime, but it becomes one when the company has a policy against it and the person doing it is trespassing on company property to do so. It apparently can be a crime if the person engaged in the dumpster diving is covered under the dumpster diving laws on the basis they are located in Indiana, even if the physical activity occurs in another state.

If it sounds complicated, it is, and that’s why you shouldn’t have to deal with it. Let someone else jump through the hoops, and you just concentrate on being a really good IT person who is there to help.