I personally don’t. I used to lose my mind over the thought of my confidential documents being leaked. Then after seeing how poorly personal information is handled, I realised it’s almost a guarantee. A few things from Australia (which has good privacy laws) that made me recognise the futility of it all:
1) the large hack of Optus in which about half of the population had their credit card details stolen.
2) the large hack of Medibank in which the details of a large portion of private health insurance customer details were stolen.
3) I applied for a mortgage and found out every 2-bit mortgage broker is emailed 100s if not 1000s of sensitive ID documents every year and they definitely do not go through their email and delete them after the closure of deals.
4) Most companies in Australia only require a name, address, and, birth date to verify identity which is easily found with five minutes of searching most of the time.
5) I set up a pin with Telstra that should have blocked administrative changes on my account for years. One day I called in, got my password ready, and they didn’t ask for it. They just did it anyway. It was entirely futile.
IMO the only way that privacy will ever become respected is if we move the onus for fraud onto the actual victims of fraud: the companies. This is the whole ancient joke about someone’s identity being “stolen”. It wasn’t stolen, your verification procedures ultimately failed as a business and you are trying to divert responsibility to avoid having to suffer a loss. This is one of the reasons I use my credit card exclusively these days - if it used fraudulently I know that I can charge back, and that’s about the only mechanism I can use to truly prevent unauthorised access to my money.
1) the large hack of Optus in which about half of the population had their credit card details stolen. 2) the large hack of Medibank in which the details of a large portion of private health insurance customer details were stolen. 3) I applied for a mortgage and found out every 2-bit mortgage broker is emailed 100s if not 1000s of sensitive ID documents every year and they definitely do not go through their email and delete them after the closure of deals. 4) Most companies in Australia only require a name, address, and, birth date to verify identity which is easily found with five minutes of searching most of the time. 5) I set up a pin with Telstra that should have blocked administrative changes on my account for years. One day I called in, got my password ready, and they didn’t ask for it. They just did it anyway. It was entirely futile.
IMO the only way that privacy will ever become respected is if we move the onus for fraud onto the actual victims of fraud: the companies. This is the whole ancient joke about someone’s identity being “stolen”. It wasn’t stolen, your verification procedures ultimately failed as a business and you are trying to divert responsibility to avoid having to suffer a loss. This is one of the reasons I use my credit card exclusively these days - if it used fraudulently I know that I can charge back, and that’s about the only mechanism I can use to truly prevent unauthorised access to my money.