Personalization-Too much too good?

This is something I love to debate to myself for prolonged hours. What with all those Phishing scams and third party cookie setters who cleverly invite you to their sites, I would always treat my personal 'personal notebook' with the same respect and care that I would give to a public computer. This would translate as not saving my email address for either Yahoo or Hotmail, never allowing broswers to remember passwords and never ever clicking 'remember me' checkboxes.

To contradict myself , I have been doing all of the things mentioned in paragraph above all of the time. I keep myself signed in linked in , Facebook etc , choose to have my email ids remembered. Thankfully I have yet not mustered the courage to save my passwords too! Almost always I get annoyed at myself when I clear my cache or Temp files, because that deletes all my settings.

What is all this about? Personalization- it sums up in one word. Almost every site I visit, I choose to personalize.This is not only, because I have lesser user ids to remember, but sometimes the look and feel of websites makes me feel sick.I mean , they actually do. When I joined Rutgers, and was told about myRutgers.edu, I told the classmate sitting next to me that ,"I have to change this skin and theme else I cant focus on the lecture about navigating the site further".Fortunately the instructor did allow us few minutes to get acquainted with the MyRutgers portal.I made good use of this time, by changing the colors and theme to suit my taste( keep me from getting sick).

How much personalization is good? I usually have my local weather, local news(and yes horoscope too!) .However; am I making it easier for Phishers? Almost always on my Yahoo email I notice an ad banner which reflects very accurately my taste of online shopping and this makes me nail bitingly nervous , but then the debate continues...Yahoo is safe etc etc.. and I continue to personalize...