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I have to say, based on 39 years of experience, that a great deal of "real" information can be gathered from using many "open sources" of data and correlating that data. The "You have nothing to fear unless you have something to hide." statement gives a false sense of security. We all have something to hide, otherwise why wear clothes or live behind closed doors. We may not be guilty of some crime but we do have things we want kept private. It's just that we (the geek crowd) are so aware of how little real privacy we do have that we tend often to ignore those "innocent" collectors like the Kindle, cookies on our computers, data collected when we buy things with a credit/debit card, etc. The only real privacy nowadays is to remain so obscure that no one notices us.
And there are laws concerning what may or may not be collected, at least against US citizens by US organizations. They fall under what is called "oversite" and came into being after certain Government organizations improperly collected data (I believe back in the 1960's).
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