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utility, shopping and bank accounts

dgrainge 20th Aug 2009

It's pretty much impossible to avoid registering with companies online nowadays. You have a reasonable expectation that information provided to a company for the purposes of registration should remain confidential - or as confidential as te agrrement you 'signed'.

There are laws in most countries saying so. There are laws regarding cross-border data transfer to contries with less secure policies.

You don't need online registration for information to be hacked or stolen. There have been many cases where laptops or CDs have been lost, containing millions of unencrypted sets of personal data.

What you do do is s**t from a mighty height on anyone allowing such data into the wild.

*On the other hand* if you put up personal data about yourself, even if intended for friends' consumprtion, you're asking for trouble.

Now I don't know what the plaintiffs' precise complaint is (one reason being, folks, that ZDnet's link to the cnet story is broken) but I don't think it clever to publish loads of info online; and for that reason I don;t like facebook et cetera.

Can somone fill me in on what sort of information disclosure we're talking about here?