Scare meme of the day: As the Internet dot-com hype bubble bursts,
large numbers of online retailers, founded on venture-capital funding and
irrational exuberance, are going out of business. Many of them have, in
their time, collected a lot of personal information about customers, notionally
under strict privacy agreements. Now that the companies are headed for
the e-afterlife, it seems that these agreements and their reputations for
keeping to them don't matter any more, as many companies
sell their private information, including credit-card numbers
and buying patterns.