Are there TONS of data for an individual? Financial data, demographics (themselves and their family), tax-IDs, social security numbers, where they live, where they shop, how much they spend, do they have a subscription on "heterosexual-intercourse" website? do they have a subscription on "same-sex-intercourse" website? do they have a subscription on "donkey-sex-show" website? (think "Clerks"), Spotify, tickets to Metallica concerts vs Opera, Netflix, hotels, airtickets, restaurants, bars, you-name-it.
A bank has this and so much more information through bank account transactions, card (credit/debit) transactions, mobile phone app data collection, KYC, etc.
I don't remember a Bank losing the data that "Henry likes donkey sex shows". Perhaps there is a naughty admin stalking the current/ex partner misusing their work-related system account privileges but that admin won't leak the data of 100000 clients.
Yes the bank doesn't have a photo of you in a political rally, but they see you spend £€$100 supporting XYZ politican or political party, or you bought a hotdog 1mile/km from that park where X politician had a speech.
How come companies like FB keep making one mistake after another, on OUR expense and the excuse is "ooops I did it again" (they played with our data).
At some point the excuses need to cease and they need to get their stuff in a right order, or be shut down.
Edit: rewrote some words/phrases for clarity.
Each major credit card company will sell you, if you’re big enough, list of all transactions that flow through their systems, not properly anonymized at all.
Banks use horribly outdated and unsafe technologies like checks, and use insurances instead of upgrading tech.
Trading companies make money by selling your orders streams and delaying your orders just enough, so they can get better deal than you.
Equifax leaked very detailed data, that can destroy your life, of almost all Americans.
How exactly is finance industry better?
Brokers: for $1k per month you can subscribe to a service that will feed you that same info, in real time. So.. your argument half-stands.
Banks: Most big banks are good/strong enough. Some smaller banks (1-20 branches) are weak. They haven's scaled enough. In the UK we now have 'open data'. It gives you the 'freedom'(?????) to share your data with 3rd parties. "what can go wrong"...
Equifax: thank US politicians for that. Bribing FTW!!!(aka Lobbying).
Credit card: they "can’t sell raw consumer data to third parties unless they provide the customer with a notice and an opportunity to opt out. In some states, customers have to opt in. They can sell anonymized data, with all personally identifiable information stripped out or hashed." (https://www.forbes.com/sites/petercohan/2018/07/22/mastercar...).
So did equifax. I'm sure if you look around you'll find many, many more. The information exposed in those breaches is reliably worse than that exposed by this facebook breach, as an example.
Loosing, no but they sell it constantly. That’s the most offensive part of the Cambridge Analytica scandal: personally identifiable, politically relevant information like what you describe was and is still sold at scale, but no one is going after the companies selling it because of that bogeyman. Facebook was blamed for something that Experian buys from credit card companies and sells to political consultants, for something that the Post office sells to political parties.
Edit: Specifically, in the US, Cambridge Analytica (and every similar company) uses credit data to know your car model; they use Post office data to know which magazines you subscribe to and they match that through your name and address to your voter record to have party affiliation and participation. Guess what arguments would resonate with a Republican voter, subscribed to _Guns & Ammos_ and still paying for his Ford F150? I know that from having personally discussed with CA Data scientist about their models.
If you want details, check the Netflix documentary "The Big Leak" at exactly 1:00:00, you‘ll see Brittany Murphy showing the screen of her laptop, with a list of all the databases they used, with sources and exact numbers. It clearly says that Facebook data was scraped (it’s either public information, like data from Ads audience network or voluntarily shared information like people clicking on pages and apps controlled by CA); the other databases were purchased.
This type of argument is made over and over on behalf of harmful institutions. The police sometimes screw up, but everyone makes mistakes. Cars (as a sibling comment points out) sometimes kill people, but that's just a fact of life, and car safety improves every year. In each case, the institution's responsibility for harm is deflected by the argument that the institution, in its current form, can't exist without doing some amount of harm. Not considered is the possibility that the institution could fundamentally change forms or stop existing entirely.