[myself248]

Worse, you've got a Hobson's choice when it comes to using many of these systems. If you decline to get your data hoovered up, you simply can't participate at all. In this way, the car's contact-download is pretty benign, you can still make phone calls even if you decline the contacts.

But it's worse pretty much everywhere else. A few years ago, my data was in a breach of a health-care company I'd never heard of and never dealt directly with, they were some sort of back-end broker several layers away from us patients. Recently I went to sign up for new insurance, and I asked for a list of all companies that might handle my data, and copies of their most recent cybersecurity audit. Of course I didn't get a useful reply, and as a 'customer', I have no useful levers to pull. I have no useful information to use when selecting an insurer. And I have no recourse unless someone starts siphoning money out of my account AND I notice and can prove that it happened because of a breach.

"Never engage with anyone" equates directly to "Go be a hermit in the mountains". If that's where our privacy laws have gotten us, I think we're doing something wrong.