I don't see them improving safety by much either. With the insane amounts of money in this industry, we would have heard about successes. Yet they are far and few between while data and identity theft is a known problem and all these "solutions" add to the danger.

I am very glad to live in a country where you have to just delete everything after a while, which includes data extracted from said material. I don't feel less safe because of that, although I would even prefer to not have these solutions at all.