If a company buys yours, does anyone expect them to buy everything expect for the information on their customers?
That gets nasty if a company is selling only the data, but the legalese that allows companies to sell data to whomever may be buying the company shouldn't come as a surprise.
It's not about it being a surprise that this happens as long as it is allowed. It's a surprise that there are no laws in place to protect consumers.
Especially in times when most "tech savvy" people advice the use of cloud services for backups, syncing, sharing and communication, a sale of a company becomes a privacy nightmare for those who listened and tried out these services. There should be more people that spell out that it is not safe to upload your data to someone else's computer.
Would you upload a backup of your data to my computer? Of course not. Would you do it if I made an over-designed one page website and offered an iOS/Android app? There are a lot who do that every day. Once the deed is done, I shouldn't be allowed to do whatever the hell I want with your data. Selling or sharing data with third parties should be strictly opt-in, no matter the circumstances.
Imagine your Dropbox, Password manager or backups being sold to the highest bidder. A company which you previously trusted becomes greedy and sells you out. There's nothing you can do about it because "you should have read the small print 10 years ago, when you started using the service." It's not surprising that there are people who'd sell you out. What is surprising is that it is allowed.
According to studies cited in the last week on HN, yes. People underestimate the sociopathy of the corporate world. Or perhaps expect more European norms to apply.
> If a company buys yours, does anyone expect them to buy everything expect for the information on their customers?
Pretty much everyone in the western world that isn't the United States expects that because it's enforced by law. Although US companies are trying to get their proxies in the US government to have that stripped away as a "trade barrier".
If a company buys yours, does anyone expect them to buy everything expect for the information on their customers?
That gets nasty if a company is selling only the data, but the legalese that allows companies to sell data to whomever may be buying the company shouldn't come as a surprise.