What does privacy mean in the age of the internet? Nations, jobs, lives and
families depend on the web for their security and prosperity, and we have
all come to rely on a handful of giant corporations. But while it was pretty
easy to work out if Royal Mail had opened your letters, it must be taken on
trust that Google,
Facebook, Twitter
and others have left your emails and instant messages unread. Yet as Barack
Obama put it, 100 per cent privacy is simply not compatible with 100 per
cent security. And those web corporations depend for much of their revenue
on analysing your data anyway.
In America the National Security Agency (NSA), and Britain’s own GCHQ, have
been accused of using the web to spy on citizens to an unprecedented extent.
In the process they've made many users distrust those web giants and today,
in a joint open letter, eight of the biggest said that what the American
government had destroyed, it should help to rebuild. They presented a plan
for regulation of spying - arguably a contradiction in terms - and sought to
paint themselves as more sinned against than sinning. “People won’t use
technology they don’t trust,” Brad Smith, Microsoft’s general counsel,
wrote. “Governments have put this trust at risk, and governments need to
help restore it.”
On some levels, this is clearly about preserving the economic growth that
Google and Microsoft foster; on another, it is about those very same
companies seeking to retain the trust upon which their businesses rely for
their vast profits. It is novel, to say the least, for technology businesses
to suggest that they know how best our security services should keep us
safe, but they may also have an interest in that too.
It has become compulsory to call Edward Snowden’s leaks from America’s NSA
‘revelations’, when in fact they probably reveal only what a sceptical mind
might have concluded after a moment’s thought: just as the web has
industrialised the scale of communications, video on demand, entertainment,
photo-sharing, porn and more, it has has offered our security services the
chance to spy on an industrial scale too. Faced with the choice between
taking a gamble on which individuals to place under intense surveillance, or
simply knowing more about everybody, state security services took an obvious
decision. It’s a moot point whether this took place on a ubiquitous or
merely a widespread scale, but either way legislation built for a bygone era
was all that restrained them. It became almost effortless to discover who
had made a phone call, from where and to whom, and technically it was not
much harder to listen in.
President Obama has already initiated a review of the NSA’s practices, but
under his government the policies that the Bush administration initiated
have continued apace, with this trend being just one that Snowden
says contributed to his profound disillusionment. There is no question
that - as with so many things - there is a generational disconnect: while
the middle-aged largely trust the state, younger people do so only to a
lesser extent, assuming that online communication is easily accessed. It in
part explains the rise of apps such as Snapchat, where messages are
automatically destroyed once they are read.
Source : Telegraph
Source : Telegraph