You’re worthless, but your data isn’t
Personal information is valuable. To you, to companies that want to lawfully spam you with advertising, and to criminals who want to steal your identity (or, in non–fear–everything–speak, commit fraud through impersonation). When you give up your personal information to a company – a store you buy from, a bank you've got an account with, … – you agree to their fifty–page long policy, which no one reads because it's too long and intentionally written in incomprehensible legalese.
Not to fear: logically, the vast amounts of personal information that float around in this modern age should be closely guarded. But, as profit always goes before common sense or the useless proletariat's rights, it isn't.
PrivacyRights carries a long yet lovely list of data breaches, a lot of which stem from companies that make a living (and, undoubtedly, a big profit) out of legally acquiring and selling personal information.
And that's just the USA. (The US government buys that information, too. With your tax dollars. It sure beats having to get a warrant on reasonable grounds of suspicion!)
But you don't care, right? This won't happen to you, right? You don't mind dealing with a $10,000 debt you never asked for, and have a shitty credit rating for the rest of your life, right?
The world's favourite search engine, Google, has a privacy policy more pathetic than Zimbabwe's economy: basically, none. It keeps just about everything. Forever.
Google has even introduced advertising based on your search history. Because you need that Margaritaville that dispenses salsa sauce from the bottom if you put it in at the top.
To be fair to them, in 2007 Google did cut the retention time for personally identifiable information. A great and noble idea – unfortunately, AOL had already shown that “anonymous” doesn't exist anymore in this modern, digital age.
Other search engines, like Yahoo and Microsoft's ridiculously named Bing, are of course hardly better and should be equally avoided.
Microsoft, holding a majority market share through dodgy deals with hardware manufacturers, has been monitoring its users for years. Windows Genuine 'Advantage' phones home more than you would expect, even after you've spent your hard–earned cash on a license for their proprietary system – all of this data needs to go somewhere, and it sure as hell isn't going into Microsoft's recycling bin. (On a positive note, with free software you wouldn't have this problem; nor have your computer controlled by a faceless, avarice–addicted corporate entity.)
Even your mobile phone company wants to sell off (sorry, “share”) your personal information – as if you didn't pay them enough already.
One can suppose this behaviour is to be expected from private, profit–driven companies. But, as usual, our supposedly democratic governments aren't much better.
Any soon–to–be totalitarian government that gets elected (it's not like that hasn't happened before) is going to have a field day with all of this information. Our prisons may be full already, but there's still plenty of bullets to go around – Chinese style.
But hey, you've got nothing to hide, right? Nothing to hide, nothing to fear! So why do you keep your curtains closed after dark?
Try to protect your privacy. Use privacy–respecting search engines like Scroogle, Ixquick or Yauba – before all of us are completely scroogled.