In the long run their actions are likely to be beneficial for both corporations and their customers. More attention will be paid to security now (at least for a

In the long run their actions are likely to be beneficial for both corporations and their customers. More attention will be paid to security now (at least for a while), instead of purely seeing it as a nuisance to spend the minimum time/money on. And programmers/sysadmins may be made more aware of how embarrassing it is to get owned by a local file inclusion hole. Or what that even is, as many "Web Developers" do not. As customer (of Bethesda, both Sony divisions and Codemasters) I'm also being even more careful now. I only put information into sign-up forms on a need to know basis. If they don't need to ship me something, they don't need my address (although sometimes this interferes with credit card validation). If they don't need my real name (so other users can identify me, usually), they get a fake one. And there's rarely a good reason to hand out a phone number or birth date anymore. In addition to this, for many years now I've been using one email address per service, which has served me well in both identifying sites that leak/sell my personal information (very popular after a company goes under) and easily filtering the resulting targeted phishing/spam.