said by gorrillamcd:You're all saying that you don't trust anyone with your data, but the fact is that you have to at least a little bit. If you do online banking for instance, you have to trust that your bank will not do anything malicious. In order to interact on the internet beyond commenting on threads like this, you have to trust companies/people at least a tiny bit. Doesn't mean you don't take precautions, but if you really didn't trust anyone with your data, you wouldn't be on the internet.
I provide the bare minimum bits of personal data to carefully selected organizations needed for a particular situation, but I don't place broad "trust" in any of them - including my bank, other financial entities, commercial establishments, or the agencies of any level of government. Which is why I watch them all like a hawk, check my statements carefully and continually, make/keep paper records, balance my own books, all of it. Mistakes do get made, hacks succeed, stuff happens... and the smaller a trail of personal data I've scattered (
especially across the volatile digital highway), the less damage gets done if anything does occur to violate the minimal elements of trust that I may have placed.
