Finance institutions not only have frequent leaks, but they also happily sell your data.

Each major credit card company will sell you, if you’re big enough, list of all transactions that flow through their systems, not properly anonymized at all.

Banks use horribly outdated and unsafe technologies like checks, and use insurances instead of upgrading tech.

Trading companies make money by selling your orders streams and delaying your orders just enough, so they can get better deal than you.

Equifax leaked very detailed data, that can destroy your life, of almost all Americans.

How exactly is finance industry better?

That'a American/USA reality my friend :) It saddens me that you (plural - the nation) allow big corp to bribe politicans openly and shamelessly (lobbying).

Brokers: for $1k per month you can subscribe to a service that will feed you that same info, in real time. So.. your argument half-stands.

Banks: Most big banks are good/strong enough. Some smaller banks (1-20 branches) are weak. They haven's scaled enough. In the UK we now have 'open data'. It gives you the 'freedom'(?????) to share your data with 3rd parties. "what can go wrong"...

Equifax: thank US politicians for that. Bribing FTW!!!(aka Lobbying).

Credit card: they "can’t sell raw consumer data to third parties unless they provide the customer with a notice and an opportunity to opt out. In some states, customers have to opt in. They can sell anonymized data, with all personally identifiable information stripped out or hashed." (https://www.forbes.com/sites/petercohan/2018/07/22/mastercar...).

CapitolOne had a major breach in 2018. Banks do have data breaches, pretty consistently in fact.

So did equifax. I'm sure if you look around you'll find many, many more. The information exposed in those breaches is reliably worse than that exposed by this facebook breach, as an example.

> I don't remember a Bank losing the data that "Henry likes donkey sex shows".

Loosing, no but they sell it constantly. That’s the most offensive part of the Cambridge Analytica scandal: personally identifiable, politically relevant information like what you describe was and is still sold at scale, but no one is going after the companies selling it because of that bogeyman. Facebook was blamed for something that Experian buys from credit card companies and sells to political consultants, for something that the Post office sells to political parties.

Edit: Specifically, in the US, Cambridge Analytica (and every similar company) uses credit data to know your car model; they use Post office data to know which magazines you subscribe to and they match that through your name and address to your voter record to have party affiliation and participation. Guess what arguments would resonate with a Republican voter, subscribed to _Guns & Ammos_ and still paying for his Ford F150? I know that from having personally discussed with CA Data scientist about their models.

If you want details, check the Netflix documentary "The Big Leak" at exactly 1:00:00, you‘ll see Brittany Murphy showing the screen of her laptop, with a list of all the databases they used, with sources and exact numbers. It clearly says that Facebook data was scraped (it’s either public information, like data from Ads audience network or voluntarily shared information like people clicking on pages and apps controlled by CA); the other databases were purchased.

Who says its at your expense. No one forced you to get a Facebook account, that was YOUR choice.

Oculus users might disagree.

Facebook is infamous for building "shadow profiles" of people that have yet to register as users.

WhatsApp users might disagree