| Product: |
email privacy |
| Date: |
17/09/02 (38 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: Very flexible
Disadvantages: Not very secure
This last three or four years, the humble E-mail has risen to prominence as the ultimate in personal communication. Its immediacy and simplicity and all pervading dominance has meant that it is now a country mile ahead of any other means of man talking to man, such that it is easier these days to spot those without the obligatory @ after their name rather than those with the cool address.
People are now much more likely to use the E-mail address for communication than just about anything, including the telephone. After all. how can you call someone up when your laptop is plugged into the hole in the wall ready to transmit your message with its oh so necessary picture attached.
And with this rise to the forefront of our minds has come a range of issues of an ethical nature. E-mail is not only one of the most flexible and immediate of communication tools, but it is also one which can be preserved for posterity, copied and re-sent, replied to and inspected, pored over to your heart's content. BUT NOT ONLY BY THE WRITER AND THE RECEIVER.
The humble ISP, innocently offering its (increasingly more rare) free service, will have free access to all those millions of communications, together with your account details, and all other manner of traces of your online activity, as will the organisation for which you work, if you are among the increasing numbers of people who trust their works account with the most confidential and personal of communiques.
The current Labour government's paranoia, together with the history changing events of September 11 2001, mean that there is an increasing readiness to pry into the doings of the free peoples of this world, to identify what the plebs are getting up to and hunt down their illegal actions and conspiratorial quests to destroy the free world. Add in to that the company's lack of trust in its employees, and suspicion that they are spending all day booking free airline tickets or che
cking out the footie results on company time, and you have the recipe for Orwell's 1984 as a clear possibility. Only these days Big Brother is not just watching you, he is listening to you, reading your E-mails and tracing your steps and filing it all away for the day when you have committed a heinous sin against the Company, the day when all your doings over the last five years are hauled out of their secret folder and laid before the judge and jury to convince them of your absolute and total guilt.
The question is whether such industrial and political snooping and prying are ever justified in these days of the Human Rights Act and our jealously guarded civil liberties.
Well, let me tell you this. We are fooling ourselves if we believe that the government and our employers don't already know everything there is to know about us. You may be naive enough to think that they are too principled to do that, after all this is England, but let me tell you my friend that you are conning only yourself. They know everything about you already, so what's a bit more snooping between friends.
The way I look at it is this. E-mail for most people (with any sense whatsoever) is a free and very effective communication tool. There is always a price to pay in the end for everything, and you should not expect a free dinner. You have only yourself to blame if you entrust very personal and very secret things to a medium which is easy to pry into. Only a fool would commit to cyber print something which you were genuinely worried that someone else would see. E-mail is a transitory and ephemeral thing, best used for rapid and disposable communication, rather than for dumping all your innermost thoughts and deep dark blackmail-prone secrets. A little bit of judicious consideration is the best defence against the danger of prying eyes.
Of course, all of this doesn't really mean that it's right that either government or employers
should go snooping through your cyber life, but it's clearly a fact of life that they are likely to take advantage of their ability to do so. I mean, we're a naturally curious species and a semi-secure means of communication is almost too tempting to resist.
The thing is anyway, whatever privacy laws you pass and however rigorously they are protected, people will always abuse their position of power. It's only natural. Remember that and take some simple precautions and you can't really go too far wrong.
I never entrust really genuinely sensitive material to the humble E-mail - there's always another way to get your message home - remember that and you won't go too far wrong.
PARANOIA RULES!!!
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