Your Personal Information.

What is your personal information ?

Well lets see... xfire...a chat program , just updated their terms and conditions and it has a pretty standard definition of what personal information their chat program gathers.


1.Collection and Use of Personal Information: When we use the term "Personal Information" we mean information such as your first/middle initial or name and last name, street address, town or city, state, zip code, telephone number, instant-messenger nickname, blog or other personal website URL, date of birth, e-mail address and any other information that would allow someone to identify you or contact you. Personal Information also includes information about your personal preferences, game play preferences, lists of your friends and their email addresses, instant-messenger nicknames or other personal identifiable information that you may add to such friend lists, survey responses and your transactions or relationship with us, if you have been a user of the Service or you have provided this type of information to any of the MTVN family of companies.


Ummm... that would be everything. More than enough to take out a morgage in my name.
And that information is now out of my control ... and so if it gets left on a lap top and gets stolen and some hacker uses it to sell my house out from underneath me (got to love those "...and any other information that would allow someone to identify you or contact you." clauses.

And if you don't like it ... too bad. I'd say don't use our program (I havn't in months) but these conditions are pretty typical of every online game , every operating system , every computer you buy , every salesman signing you up for a rebate (you never get the rebate , but they definately keep all the info on file for ever) everything.

Dell sold all my banking info to Sympatico. I'm still pissed. My BANKING info. Bank account, access codes , permission to take money from me , everything. And then only told me about it afterwards. My faith in big business is gone. Personal experiance you understand , not something I read in some paper somewhere.