I'm much more concerned about real world privacy...think about how many businesses, doctor's offices, banks, etc. ask you for your social security number. Usually they just say "it's just for identification." It's so easy to screw up someone's life with this information if the wrong person gets ahold of it. If you've ever seen reports on how easy it is to steal a person's identity using their social security number, you know what I mean. This causes so much more chaos than a web site asking me for my e-mail address and my name ( I use initials for my first name anyway). So web sites collecting this type of information doesn't concern me as much.