Following on from this article:
Private firms are selling spying tools and mass surveillance technologies to developing countries with promises that "off the shelf" equipment will allow them to covertly snoop on millions of emails, text messages and phone calls, according to a cache of documents published on Monday.
Add this to the out of control surveillance states and various agencies that are merely out of any form of control.
Sending anything confidential, be it for personal or business purposes, seems to be a bit futile. Private courier services should start to boom soon.
What use is the internet?
You can have your social network and pratfalls pages up. However this will be no doubt checked by every Human Resources department as you strive to start a career.
You can shop for a new lover if that is what floats your boat.
You can shop for pretty much anything under the sun.
Whatever you buy you can guarantee that your information is then for sale, just like filling in a form for a store or rewards card.
OK, I can handle the junk mail through the door and in my outlook in box, one can be recycled the other dumped automatically [although I scan it for errors].
It sort of reduces the internet to inanity and pointlessness.
I prefer physical shopping especially at markets for the human interaction if nothing else, the internet is useful for more obscure items but the joys of scanning in a bookshop is hard to beat. If you live miles from anywhere then the internet is a boon.
However after saying that, it is hard to rationalize the reality of what is going on and the dream some of us had that the internet offered immense opportunities for global understanding.
It now seems to be a place to avoid if you want to express yourself freely and openly.
It now seems to be a place where you do not communicate with your clients anything other than to organize date of the next physical meeting [forget video conferencing].
I may be being paranoid, yet; both myself and my business are contractually liable for the security of the information that we handle. I have always kept their files in offline physical storage [discs/paper], quite a few terabytes so far, with backups stored in another building.
It will be interesting to see how this pans out, but the best way seems to be going back quite a few years and handing over all information in person. At least it's more enjoyable, if time consuming.