“Privacy of communication aims to avoid the interception of communications, including mail interception, the use of bugs, directional microphones, telephone or wireless communication interception or recording and access to e-mail messages.” (Friedewald, 2013)

We’ve agreed that our thoughts and feelings are a private matter. Now, we’ve decided to share them with someone – with particular someone, not with everybody. So these messages dedicated to a recipient should not escape our control, right? Haha, haha, hohoho.

To be honest, I’m often having second thoughts before writing an email about something really delicate. And I usually write in a manner that for example the person which is being mentioned there not in a nice way would be still alright to read it. Well firstly, I do not trust myself that I won’t send the mail to someone wrong (happend to the head of HR in one company that she mistook a name of the boss with the name of an employee which she wanted to fire, oops). Secondly, the digital representation of our messages makes it so easy to copy+paste, to resend it, to spread it.

I wanted to say something meaningful now, but I have another story about the new ingenious ways to pay on the internet. A lady in a tram was on the phone: “To buy the ticket you will need some numbers from my card, wait a second.” Whole tram hold their breath, while the lady was dictating the data closing the conversation with: “Isn’t it great that it is so easy today?”

What to say. Postal secret is here for some time. We should definitely build on it. The jungle of technologies is making our communication vulnerable. And we can easy put ourselves in troubles by making something stupid. I would say that some education could do some good and that we should think twice if we are dealing with important data. There are experts (and you can google their opinions) that can help you with security of your communication channels (or help you to choose the right channels). It starts with giving it a thought – what I wouldn’t be happy about if it leaked out?

References
- Finn, R. L., Wright, D., & Friedewald, M. (2013). Seven types of privacy. In European data protection: coming of age (pp. 3-32). Springer Netherlands.