Originally Posted by Bart
True. And I respect your view about how much personal information we should give to the government. My biggest criticism against privacy advocates, though, is how they say almost nothing about how much personal information is given to non-government enterprises. The threat of identification theft is more likely from mailing lists and other seemingly innocent information collection "customer marketing" practices than from what is given to the government. To clarify, I do advocate keeping the government out of my personal affairs as much as practical, but let's not ignore what in my opinion is a greater danger resulting from everyday common marketing practices.
Where do you get that idea? If you say, go to Electronic Privacy Information Center's home page at
http://www.epic.org/, you will find news about their efforts to improve privacy both within government and private spheres.
In the private sphere they seem to concentrate on financial institutions due to the importance of keeping financial information private, but you can see they also have a lawsuit against Northwest Airlines and are filing amicus briefs in a case against the Record Industry Association of America.