Should we trust Google or the Government to be safe ?

Surveillance has changed in the age of the internet

 

 

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