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Your Personal Information is Private, Unless We Need to Sell It

posted by janrinok on Tuesday June 30 2015, @05:15PM   Printer-friendly
from the you-mean-sombody-hadn't-realised? dept.

tt0265459 writes:

The New York Times published an article on Sunday confirming what we've all assumed — that internet privacy policies are so full of loopholes as to be meaningless. They found that of the 100 top alexa-ranked english-language websites, 85 had privacy policies that permitted them to disclose users' personal information in cases of mergers, bankruptcy, asset sales and other business transactions.

When sites and apps get acquired or go bankrupt, the consumer data they have amassed may be among the companies' most valuable assets. And that has created an incentive for some online services to collect vast databases on people without giving them the power to decide which companies, or industries, may end up with their information.

"In effect, there's a race to the bottom as companies make representations that are weak and provide little actual privacy protection to consumers," said Marc Rotenberg, the executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a nonprofit research center in Washington.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 30 2015, @07:00PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 30 2015, @07:00PM (#203434)

    > Hey! I have nothing to hide. My real information is:

    I use the identity of people who previously lived at my current address. Helps it blend in since they are already on the record as residents of the address. It can be problematic if they filed a change-of-address with the USPS and you actually need to receive anything through the USPS - fedex/ups/dhl are fine.

  • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Tuesday June 30 2015, @07:07PM

    by kaszz (4211) on Tuesday June 30 2015, @07:07PM (#203443) Journal

    Use a delivery destination somewhere else than you live and pay using COD, debit cards, cash etc?
    As long as you make good on payment on your orders and not bother anyone. I don't think mail order companies give a sh-t?

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 30 2015, @09:52PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 30 2015, @09:52PM (#203521)

      I use a private mailbox for correspondence for my real identity.

      I use the masked-cards service from Abine for online purchases, they let you use any name on the masked card# that you want. Abine only gets my PO-box address (since they have my real CC#) but they never my residential address since that info stays with the merchant. So it acts as a firewall.

  • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Tuesday June 30 2015, @08:39PM

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Tuesday June 30 2015, @08:39PM (#203492) Journal

    I use the identity of people who previously lived at my current address.

    I hope you did some checks on them first. Otherwise you might one day have an unexpected visit from a debt collector …

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 30 2015, @09:48PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 30 2015, @09:48PM (#203519)

      I actually did get a visit. But not for the identity I had chosen. There is not much they could do anyway, if they were to serve me papers for the real person it would suck for the real person who is probably already in trouble anyway.