People are understandably upset when they assume that they have certain privacy rights and then later find out that they do not. But if people really cared about their privacy then we would see them flocking to debit cards, which are much more similar to cash than credit cards. Two databases that arose in different organizations, or for different purposes, will probably be incompatible in many ways, for example through the different meanings they assign to data fields that sound superficially the same. Organizations that maintain personal data have their hands full just maintaining the accuracy of the databases they have, without trying to create the one gigantic Big Brother hyperdatabase that privacy advocates are always warning us against. Privacy advocates are crying wolf.
Mail is a democratic medium, available to all.
When newspapers and television stations publicize attacks on mail from the tiny handful of self-styled privacy activists, their real agenda is to suppress competition to their centralized control of communication in our society. These issues about computers and privacy aren't really new and aren't really about computers. Quite the contrary, it is returning us to the old-time village where everybody knew everybody else's business. The problem isn't privacy per se. In this context, when people's identities are distributed across cyberspace, concepts of privacy don't even make sense any more.