Have you been reading my email?
Editor's note: This is part of an ongoing series for consumers about Internet issues.
Monday I made the well-known claim that our Internet mail is not private. Our electronic letters can be read by anyone who has a smattering of knowledge about email.
Given that electronic mail is supplanting hardcopy mail, how can we American citizens go about living our personal and professional lives under the cloud of having forsaken privacy? The Internet vendors tell us we should not be using the Internet if we have something to hide.
I disagree. Most of us use the Internet to exchange harmless, yet sometimes sensitive letters with our loved ones and friends. They are often personal and private. If they are exposed, they will not do us under, but why should they be exposed in the first place?
The Internet vendors say our correspondence needs to be examined in order for their sales outlets to "profile" us - to find our tastes and distastes - for their targeted ads. Imagine! We have become marketing guinea pigs for Internet's Madison Avenue.
Perhaps this exposure of our personal life could be considered harmless. After all, why should we care if a health monitoring website learns we have recently been diagnosed with cancer, and we might be denied care or pay more for insurance? Why should we be concerned if neighbor Joe knows our spouse has left us and taken our credit cards in the process?
I wager I am a preacher talking to a concerned congregation, because I sense all of us care. The Internet was conceived as a network for personal communications, not as a network for commercial advertisements. I am not opposed to money-making billboards. One of my former companies was built around advertising, but I did not check out the religious, political, and sexual preferences of my advertising targets - as is being done today.
What can we do to gain back our privacy in a system that is rendering U.S. mail moot? In view of Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn onslaughts, how can we keep the valued American treasure of privacy intact?
Answer: We cannot. The gate has long been opened, and the Internet advertiser cows are in the pasture, feeding on the long grass of information about you and me.
In hindsight, the Internet email envelope should have been given the same sanctity as a U.S. mail envelope. But no one in the early times of the Internet (including this writer) foresaw how the network would evolve.
A Commercial and Social Problem
I doubt the clock will be rolled back to treat email with the same respect for privacy as regular mail. The lobbyists for keeping the Internet as an advertising and data-retrieving medium are too powerful for Washington to muster the political will to make amends, even if it had the constitutional authority to do so. Thus, unless the Supreme Court takes the matter into its hands, it is reasonable to predict that the Internet will evolve to a point where very little information is treated as private.
However, all is not lost. I conclude this article with some good news: simple actions which Internet end-users can perform to take back some of their privacy.
Encrypting Email and Smartphone Traffic
These two articles have been devoted to a specific kind of Internet end-user traffic: email. This emphasis continues, but I interject the idea that similar privacy protection can be obtained with other traffic as well, such as voice traffic.
An Internet end-user does have an effective line of defense (as of this writing). The use of encryption applications (apps) allows the communicating parties to scramble (encrypt) their correspondence. Unless Uncle Sam or sophisticated hackers move to the next level of breaking the codes of these apps (which they are working on), our electronic mails can once again have their envelopes sealed. For example, Google Message Encryption (GME) enables end-users to secure their email by using a Google security package.
To conclude this series, I take us one more step than what companies such as Google offer in protecting privacy. These systems protect our privacy while our email is in the Internet. They do not protect our privacy after the emails have been unscrambled and placed on our computer.
If we are concerned about the privacy of the files stored on our machine, it is a simple matter to use another package to scramble this data. In this way, this information will be known only to us and anyone with whom we wish to share the "key" to "unlock" this information. For example, the widely-used Microsoft WORD has an easy-to-use encryption option which allows a user to scramble any WORD document.
As mentioned, the same kinds of security packages are available to end-users who use smartphones. They, too have encryption packages.
If you are not using these security services, it can only be assumed you do not mind if others know about your written and spoken communications. On the other hand, if you do care but you continue to ignore them, you have abandoned Benjamin Franklin's advice: Be aware that distrust and caution are the parents of security - and privacy.
Uyless Black is an award-winning author of many books on computer software and advanced communication technologies. He was a software programmer for the Federal Reserve and a consulting business owner in California and Virginia. He resides in Coeur d'Alene.