Published on 2026-10-17.
So a company or project lists a nice looking privacy policy, but can you really trust that?
If you had a visit from someone you don't really know, and you had to go to the bathroom, would you trust that this person doesn't start looking through your drawers and your closest as soon as you leave the room?
Normally trust is earned, but somehow we often blindly trust what a company states on their privacy policy. As a contractor, I have personally been at several places where the privacy policy was laughed at, it was a joke. It said all the good stuff, but everything was logged, kept, mishandled, etc. Nobody cared.
At other places, the company is serious about its privacy policy, but the employees cannot be trusted. At one place I worked at (for a short time) some of the technical staff was misusing customer servers, going through customer emails, private files, even running hidden services on customer servers, etc. That was really bad. The company trusted the employees and they didn't know.
But even when nothing like that goes on, even when every single employee is truly doing their best, and even if the company truly isn't selling your data to third parties, can you then trust a company to manage your data if they keep logs or other private data lying around? What if the company gets hacked and your data is then sold or misused in some other way?
In Denmark, we just recently had one of the biggest and most catastrophic data breaches of highly sensitive private data ever due to a completely and totally unacceptable management of data. The breach exposed information linked to around 8.8 million CPR numbers. The CPR system is Denmark's central civil registration database and contains personal information on people living or previously registered in Denmark.
The breach was not because of skilled hackers breaking into accounts, no, the breach happened because someone gained access through an IT company's account protected by the password "123456".
Of course society as a whole cannot function without trust and we trust each other all the time. Something as simple as walking in the street or driving a car requires a great amount of trust in our fellow human beings. Still, a privacy policy is not something that should be trusted blindly, anyone can write a good looking privacy policy and make a lot of empty promises, especially with the help of an "AI".