Visualization of routing paths through the Internet. Courtesy The Opte Project.
Listen to Roger Currie’s commentary on email privacy
Hands up those of you who believe that your e-mail is private? Might you also be putting your money on the Blue Bombers, also known as the Winnipeg Interims, to win the Grey Cup?
I can’t remember who said it, but it was quite a few years ago that I was told “Don’t put anything in an e-mail that you wouldn’t be comfortable seeing on the front page of the Free Press, or the Leader Post, or any of those vanishing publications”.
G Mail, which must be close to being the most popular mail server these days, has admitted in a private submission in a U.S. court that their users have “no reasonable expectation of privacy” when it comes to the messages they tap out on their little keyboards.
Ah, but it’s different in Canada. We’re a sovereign nation and no one at FBI headquarters wants to read our mail, do they? Really? Why do you think banks don’t ever trust e-mail with really important financial information?
Until relatively recently, Americans firmly believed that their e-mails and phone calls were private. Then guys like Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden blew Washington’s cover, and we found out that the Obama administration, in the name of the War on Terror has been invading personal privacy for years, more than any other administration in history.
There was a time that Manning and Snowden would be celebrated as Persons of the Year in Time Magazine. Now they have to rely on people like Vladimir Putin to help them.
When it comes to the ‘death of privacy’ in our society, let’s maybe start with people like Mark Zuckerberg. Facebook enables all of us to be ‘exhibitionists’. The material we post on that site is not pornographic. It’s mostly just boring, and it’s why I choose to spend as little time there as possible.
I’m Roger Currie
