How true! I worked for a huge telco for many years and they claimed public trust was a keystone of their brand. Call detail records were tightly held and internally regulated – except for what the federal government wanted, but the public and employees were never told about that. In the mid 90s an Internet arm was made and there were numerous discussions about how private data was. It was decided to violate the trust of the consumers without telling them. Since then the company has apparently done some fairly nasty things – the old promise of trust simply evaporated.

I’ve had many discussions on trust and data protection with security experts and most will tell you (a) this is really important and (b) the public doesn’t care, At least until they’ve been burned. With medical records there needs to be a much tighter standard and that is why HIPAA was necessary (although it doesn’t go far enough). Some things are too important to trust to for profit companies run by humans and laws with teeth are needed. (not that people trust the government, but that is another issue)