Sunday, December 02, 2007

Who Is Reading Your Email?

This a subject I have written about before. It is worth revisiting because most people still think the email messages they send are private, like the US mail or a telephone call or a fax. But they are not. Click here to see my earlier posting.

Email and instant messages are nothing more than text files that can be intercepted and copied as they travel from here to there over the Internet. These stored messages can be later read by others and come back to haunt you.

In the future:
  • More and more organizations will engage in monitoring network traffic, including employee email, instant messaging, and web surfing.
  • Telephone calls are increasingly traveling over the Internet. They will be subject to the same kinds of storage, retrieval and monitoring issues that now affect email.
  • Employers will adopt the behavioral profiling technologies of online marketers in evaluating employees based on each one's use of information systems.

Bottom line, Big Brother will be listening, reading and watching you. So will Big Sister and all their Little Brothers and Sisters.

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