Last year, I found the pages of the above piece by Consumer reports, ripped out of the magazine at my local library, before asking the reference desk to track down another copy.
I believe US laws restricts disclosure of Age, Financial, Medical, and perhaps Military discharge status, as conditions of employment or purchase, but those laws discourage no one from asking for that information.
See 2006 figures: ID Theft Is Exploding In The U.S.
http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=197800774 I am also suspicious of MS Windows ".NET Framework", which invites me to store a master password on some industrial-internet server, and MS Windows "Automatic Updates", which keeps re-installing the ".NET Framework" every time I try to remove it.
Further, whenever using Windows, a two-way firewall must be used to block components from transmitting my data out to the internet, since the Windows XP firewall only checks one-way, or arriving transmissions.
I see Open-Source software produced under a General Public Licenses (GPL), as modeling public policy and consumer protections, while the Captains of Industry are largely shown by state courts as drunken pirates that plan strategic-legal penalties as part of the cost of doing business.
