Lots of companies are jumping on the privacy bandwagon because it's good marketing, but most of it is a pathetic sham.

 

Licensed intrusion

It's eye-opening to read the "privacy" policies of most major organizations. But if you can suffer that chore, you'll discover a list of exceptions as long as your arm...

Oh yes, your information is private, unless they need to check it, or unless their vendors need to look, or their advertisers, or their business partners, or any of a million government agencies - even without a warrant. Or… or… or…. they're literally riddled with holes. 

This is not an exaggeration — read some of them.  In all fairness, they should be called Intrusion Policies.

 

Our policy and practices

Contrast that with our privacy policy: We don't collect ANY information about you.  Nothing, nada, zero.  You can pay anonymously too.  We use multiple and different layers of the best encryption available, and only you have the keys. 

We couldn't read your information if our lives depended on it, and neither can anyone else.  IP addresses are not used internally in our network to route data, so it's not possible for recipients to tell where a sender is.  It's even encrypted after it gets to the people you send it to. Moreover, all metadata is also encrypted. There are no 'except for this' or 'unless that' clauses in our policy on privacy.  We don't need them.  And neither do you.  

 

What they don't tell you…

Sometimes what big companies don't tell you is even more revealing than what's printed in their policies. 

For example, a popular provider of hardware and cloud services recently introduced 'encrypted messaging'.  Yipee, right?  That's sure how they promoted it.  And most people took it at face value… "Company A is protecting me"! 

But what they left out was the fact that the messages are secured by a password so pathetically short that any amateur hacker could peel them open in minutes.  They kind of forgot to mention that.

 

Privacy in theory and privacy in practice

The sad and simple truth is, privacy protections are only theoretical — the reality is, if a company has information about you, that information will not be private.  Either it will be released via countless legal paths, or it will be hacked, or simply fall victim to incompetence or outright negligence. 

The only way to be really sure is to deal only with companies that do not collect any personal information in the first place