Associations/Affiliations

You have a right to have your interactions with a company to be kept between you and the company with which you are interacting — exercise that right or lose it.

Type	Score	Description
Responsible	+1	All affiliates of the product vendor treat all data collected from the vendors customers with reverence and respect, making no use of the collected data of any kind that is not intended or expected by the customer.
Neutral	-1	There are web services of companies that provide useful functionality to other companies. Unfortunately there is a strong trend emerging of using these services to double as data collectors (think "Like" button and "facebook login"). The company using this service very likely only intends to gain the benefit of the service; unfortunately, whether the intention or not, they are still subjecting their customers data to unwanted scrutiny.
Gossiper	-2	Any vendor that is a willing participant in coercing their customers to naively participate in centralized social networks is just as untrustworthy as the gossip service itself. Examples of this are "facebook only" contests, providing discounts that are available only through a centralized social network, or making product information available only through a centralized social network.

There was a time that when applying for a job, or possibly even asking for a loan, companies would ask for references. This request was to obtain additional sources of information about the applicant. It wasn't really a privacy violation as the references were supplied by the applicant and presumably the applicant asked the reference if they minded.

Like so many other things in our society over the last several years the way our associates impact our lives is changing. Today companies profile their customers, and potential customers (pottemers), based on who they associate with on-line. So if a person posts very little their self, but are linked to others who do, those detailed profiles of their "friends" are used as a defining characteristic for them. The term "friends" and "friends of friends" should be familiar to most by now. That's a very useful concept to companies.

As it has been said, "turnabout is fair play." If a company has ties to a gossip oriented central data repository, then it should be assumed that they have gossip inclinations as well. These days it is actually difficult to find a company or service that isn't begging you to "Like" them on facebook, or "Follow" them on Twitter, but there are degrees of association. The more prominent central social repositories are on their site, or in their product, the harder it is to turn off references to these repositories, or the more aggressively they push for their own customers to join these repositories; the more they should be avoided themselves.