I work at a lot of startups as a contractor. The disregard for privacy and user data everywhere I go is astounding. They're all in survival mode.
If you want rules to be respected then you must be able to enforce them. Poorer places just can't afford to enforce those rules. If rules aren't enforced equally then people won't follow them, because if they have additional costs that their competition doesn't then they'll likely be outcompeted.
But that's exactly what we do. The health inspector doesn't come to your home to verify that you wash your cutting board, even on the day you have a dinner party to entertain business clients. Depending on local law you may or may not be expected to follow the same rules as McDonalds (getting a food service license etc.) when you hold a high school bake sale, but people commonly don't actually do it and governments commonly don't actually enforce it in those circumstances.
Because it's more important, and justifies a higher compliance burden, to ensure that the company serving billions of hamburgers isn't giving people food poisoning than the individual serving four.
Then what does it actually do?
Not all of them. Especially not "I'm pinning a note with the phone numbers of the parents of my daughters friends to the fridge".
As it's really hard to use a phone number for anything else than phoning someone, we can also reasonably say that the data is only used under the originally stated purposes.
And then the phone number is not shared with the public, but stored at a secure location (fridge) having organizational (family rules) and technical (locked doors, windows) policies in place to secure the information.
Given the required security level for a __single__ phone number I would say this would be a reasonable level of caution.
So what happens if you got the phone number from your friend's sister? Or off of caller ID?
> As it's really hard to use a phone number for anything else than phoning someone, we can also reasonably say that the data is only used under the originally stated purposes.
There are lots of things you can do with a phone number other than phoning someone. There are services that effectively use phone numbers as usernames, you could give it to them to see if your friend is on that service. When your new girlfriend asks who this number on the caller ID is you can tell them who it is (disclosing it to them). You could store it on your computer which gets backed up to some random cloud service in the US. That's all common human behavior.
> And then the phone number is not shared with the public, but stored at a secure location (fridge) having organizational (family rules) and technical (locked doors, windows) policies in place to secure the information.
The scenario is that it's also being posted to a public blog.
> Given the required security level for a __single__ phone number I would say this would be a reasonable level of caution.
Is it more common for a person to know a __single__ phone number, or have an address book full of them?
You're looking for the case where by coincidence it happens to not be a violation. Even if you find it, that doesn't help anything if accidental violations remain widespread.
Older systems which depend on having PII and even financial information as cleartext in the database are the problem - and its essentially technical debt with far-reaching consequences, so no-one will fix a system that uses tenants’ customers’ SSNs as a primary-key (yup).
I have tried to explain so many times that this system needs to be replaced urgently not for security reasons but because no one actually knows how to use rails 1 anymore.