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true, but people keep a lot of sensitive information lying around the internet - you'd have to trust all those sites too, right?

• marciovm123 17y ago
  yea but this is a very concentrated list of extremely private information - for your whole life, a list of people you were interested in hooking up with could cause all kinds of harm.
  • vptes11 17y ago
    The messages, emails, and IMs you send around, not to mention your credit card/address/etc., are equally as sensitive.
    • endtime 17y ago
      Not on average. As marciovm pointed out, this is highly concentrated. It's also the kind of information you might be unlikely to put in an email or IM. Trusting people with email and credit card info carries legal and financial risks, but this carries a social risk that can have a much longer-lasting effect.
    • kgrin 17y ago
      True. Which is why I'd think twice switching email providers. Obviously you make a decision every time you give another entity any information, and storing data with Google/Facebook/et. al. carries risks as well. But, as others have pointed out, the concentration and nature of this information matters too. I'm reminded of the Veronica Mars episode about the "Purity Test" - Step 1: get everyone's socially valuable data Step 2: Hilarity/blackmail ensues Just to be clear - I'm not accusing the site of doing anything nefarious, just pointing out the difficulty of establishing trust. I suspect there's a lot of money to be made in figuring out how to bridge that trust gap (of course, that's a little bit like the various authentication or email trusted-sender schemes that float about - IF ONLY we could will some universally trusted and known-good structures into existence, certain problems would be that much easier to solve...)