The rest of it is just… scary. Privacy policies be damned — they can and are changed at a whim to suit the needs of the company, with pretty much no recourse for information gathered before the changes.

There are advertisers and sales slugs out there that would drool all over themselves to the point of needing a mop to have this much marketing information tied to a physical address.

What’s scarier than the questions asked here is the fact that most people WILL give away this information for that infinitesimally small chance to win a trinket of some kind.

I understand (though it took some explaining from Jersey Todd and Jen from Bucket) that they need the mailing information to send you prizes, and I guess that’s OK. But that really needs to have a big wall between that and the survey information.

A bigger question, though, is demographic information really useful at all? You might get geographic information if you’re mailing stuff to people, but I can’t once remember an instance where I put anything other that “Less than $25,000″ or “$250,000 or more” on any survey I’ve taken. So if everyone lies on the demographic information, doesn’t that invalidate it?