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from the you-mean-sombody-hadn't-realised? dept.
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.
Original Submission
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 01 2015, @08:37AM
OK, so based on the serial number, you can say that I probably bought some stuff at the larger shop ("probably" because I could as well have given that same bank note to a taxi driver who used it to pay a hair cut at a small shop, where the same note was later given as change to some other guy who used it to pay a hooker who then gave that note to the pimp who finally used it to pay in that larger shop). There's no way to say whether I (or whoever got the bank note) bought cheese, socks, cooking equipment, a DVD, a computer keyboard, a computer magazine, a newspaper of some bicycle equipment (yes, all those items are sold in that same shop).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 01 2015, @08:39AM
err ...
s/of some bicycle equipment/or some bicycle equipment/