My hypothesis is that it's a frog in a pot of water scenario. Western Union started the first charge account in 1914, so we've had a long time to get used to the water heating up. It probably did start with honest intentions to make things work a little smoother, but I remember the early days of digitizing records, and there was a LOT of loose data just there for the taking.

I remember that I used to work at RadioShack in the late '00s, and I had to escalate up to district because we discovered a treasure trove of old paper store credit applications that had been cached somewhere in the backrooms, and my manager wanted to just throw them in the normal garbage and not risk the cost of the extra shredding coming out of her bonus.

These things had SO MUCH INFO, handwritten out onto a paper form; name, birthday, SSN, mailing address, street address, then all that info of the spouse/cosigner that wanted to be on the account too. I could have made so much money on the black market, looking back.