The Wall Street Journal has a great piece about personal information and privacy (or lack thereof): http://on.wsj.com/VV5mJD
The article begins with a story about a man in the market for a new car, who filled out a form to provide his contact information to a local dealership. The form did that, and much more, providing his information to a company that tracks car shoppers online. This company is able to track everything he does online, but it's no longer anonymous; his name, email address, and all contact info is associate with his traffic. The next time he went into the dealership, that dealer would be able to pull up ALL this information.
Probably because of my naivety or apathy, I'm not super concerned when comes to privacy issues online, but this crosses a line in my opinion. Tracking web traffic for re-targeting purposes or anonymous market research is OK, but once that information becomes associated with personal information and can be used in person, I get uncomfortable. I'm not necessarily uncomfortable in the way this information is used, but I'm uncomfortable because it probably not stored with complete security.
There should be some requirement to remove all personal information when the data is accessed by real people, rather than automatic ad serving platforms than can access encrypted information.
Here's a list of sites that share personal information: http://on.wsj.com/VV9dGu
Pretty interesting to see which sites share what information.
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