I recall as a younger child (teens, in the early to mid 2000s) there were these websites that allowed you to get all kinds of free stuff as long as you gave them your details. I, as someone who had only just discovered the internet (i.e. clueless) after emigrating to the Netherlands only a few years earlier and being in a relatively poor household, decided it was the most awesomest thing. I was signing up for all of these websites.

"Who cares!" I thought to myself. "What can they even do?! As long as I don't pay them anything it's fine!" I naively told my parents, who were just as naive around these issues. I got told off a few times, not because I was giving out my data to every company under the sun, but because random things were coming through the door.

I remember once a prominent pet food company sent out a sample cat food package. I didn't even like cats. Pets were frowned upon in our culture.

Needless to say, I'm some 15 years older now, and I regret every single form I was filling out back then. I realise that everything has vastly changed and systems change, but I can't help but feel somewhere some system still has my data, and it's only a matter of time before something wrong happens with it, if it hasn't already.

This kind of thing probably targets similar households. Poor people who are generally uneducated on these matters. It's sad that such thing isn't outlawed.