throwaway12145

Some of those "baddies" you refer to are forced by contract to willingly upload that data and keep quiet about it. The penalties for breach of contract are severe; an entire company can go bankrupt overnight if they break the seal.

It's not black and white, I'm afraid. Those companies writing up the unfair contracts (Oracle, Visa, etc.) deserve a decent share of the blame, too.

Visa requires at least some of their banking/prepaid partners to periodically upload customer data to an Acxiom FTP site. It's considered a "compliance" ask.

Source: helped write a microservice for said FTP upload.