It’s not necessarily about “the government”, well it is, because governments often contain, or may come to contain, bad people, but they shouldn’t be the only concern.

It’s about not making it easy for bad people to interfere in your business, even if what you’re doing is all legitimate and above board; and not making it easy for bad people to harm you or those close to you either.

Mobile telephone numbers aren’t strictly a secret, especially those on monthly contracts. Names and numbers are linked in a provider’s database somewhere. But for an untrusted third party to know that information? It’s bad enough when someone who needs to know it sells it on to a telemarketing database. Imagine what would happen if any old crank got a hold of that.

Likewise we all have real names, home addresses (for the lucky majority anyway), etc. There are people who know these things. Perhaps even people we’d rather didn’t, but it would be incredibly stupid to leave that information in plaintext for anyone else to find, especially if it can be linked to our online activity.

You might be the most fair and balanced Internet user in the world, but if your name and address is public, any crank who takes exception to you anyway will be at your door shouting and raving before you know it.

If we have to give it over, presumably to a trusted individual or organisation, we need a method where it can’t be intercepted. So it’s either a slip of paper at a clandestine meeting place or you need encryption to send it over the Internet.

There’s plenty of other personal information that I haven’t mentioned here where similar rules will apply.