Aft
er reading the article “Thanks to Decades-Old Law, Your E-mail is Far From Private“, I started thinking (once again) about privacy issues and the themes found in Little Brother. One of the scariest things is that the majority of Americans don’t realize this. This is particularly troublesome because of how commonly we use e-mail to communicate and share information, be it something we want to keep private or not.
One very important question is: How often is this information requested?
Google, reported earlier this month in its biannual transparency report that in the first half of 2012 it received 20,938 requests from governments to hand over user data (including e-mail, searches, and other stored information)—a more than 50 percent increase over 2010.
While the number of requests is small when compared to the amount of people who use e-mail, it does highlight some privacy issues regarding how we view digital communications. This is another example of how the law has not yet been able to catch up to technology.
[In the early days of the internet], most people downloaded and stored e-mail on their personal computers. So it was assumed that any e-mail left on a server (such as Earthlink or AOL) for more than 180 days had been abandoned.
Apps on the cloud: Credit: http://dvice.com/
Since we now have this great and wonderful method of storage called “The Cloud”, we no longer need to download our emails. However, since we are allowing a third party to host them, all any agency needs in order to access these communications is a subpoena. While we, the general public, expect our emails to be private regardless of where we store them, apparently the law does not.
This is a real world example of some of the privacy issues that were mentioned in Little Brother. Government and law enforcement agencies can keep databases filled with all of our electronic communications, and we’d never know that they had them. It’s not enough that they can track our movements through methods like security cameras, cell phone gps, or Clipper Cards for MUNI. Now they can even track what we are saying, and who we’re saying it to.
We all became upset when we discovered that the Patriot Act expanded law enforcement’s abilities to spy on us, and then we rationalized it by saying that we shouldn’t care if we have nothing to hide. But what about those of us who are private people? What if we like privacy for privacy’s sake? First we learn that they (the government) can wiretap our phones without us knowing about it, now we learn that they can read and store our emails, too. Where will government’s intrusion into our personal lives end?
One thing that really scares me about this issue is that we “shouldn’t assume that personal information collected about you by local police departments is secure and could not be misused by criminals”. Just because it’s on a police database somewhere in cyberspace doesn’t mean that it’s safe. And the more information that is stored there, the more tempting a target it makes.
My parents always tell me to be careful of what I post online, and now it looks like I’ll have to be careful about my emails as well, since it seems like Big Brother likes to read them, too.