Don't talk me out of my paranoid mode. :p

I guess part of the background is that I am not only worried what a company might do if they're evil enough. (Recently, Germany's biggest phone company, Telekom, was found out do be doing illegal surveillance and saving telephone data of Telekom-critical journalists, union members, and regulatory authorities for years, to recreate who is talking to whom. (Seeing I am the daughter of a journalist and a union leader, I found that interesting in a not so abstract way, although of course I am aware that my humble parents probably weren't a target at all.)

The German government is planning to safe Email- Telephone- and Online-Data and sms in an act to prevent terrorism (which Germany has been a main target of [/sarcasm], so we should go more Orwell than other states...). They actually want to do rather publicly what the Echelon project has been doing for years. ( ECHELON) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaAnd more examples like that, ad infinitum.

So, I guess I am somewhat influenced by the current public debate here, plus there's an almost traditional debate about how transparent the average private person should become since the German government tried a census in the eighties and had to abandon the program because they raised -or planned to raise- too much private data from the people - the populace boykotted the thing. So now, the debate is also driven by the question why there was a successful uproar, when people wanted to remain private in the eighties, but willingly give all the private data you can think of to companies who might be forced to hand them over to the government in future, say, during a crisis or perceived crisis we probably can't think of as of yet.

I am less worried about someone stealing my bank data... with only 20 bucks to loose and no credit on my account, what could they do... :(