Hi Big Brother – come on in to my life….

That’s what you say, every time you search the internet, every time you post on social media.

In short, there is very little privacy.  If you dont believe me, listen to Edward Snowden (interview with Edward Snowden on Last Week Tonight, US TV show):

There are two issues which have come to the fore since technology has brought us into the cloud with gmail, hotmail etc and social networks, and cloud music and books, and so on: Privacy and Trust.

And mostly, we don’t care.  We don’t read the privacy policies, which in fact, mostly tell you that you have invited Big Brother onto your computer to monitor all your cyber activity and in fact they might bring another few spies (third party cookies) with them.

We just need to understand that, and we also need to make sure that those around us, especially children posting on social networks understand that.

Trust is interesting because at the beginning of any sort of engagement, we have a default level of trust.  Depending on our personal characteristics, we are trusting or not so trusting, so things happen to raise or lower our trust levels.   If we make a transaction on the internet, and our sensitive financial data, for example is stolen then our trust in the internet and especially in the business involved will diminish.

Its not just our financial data we need to worry about, it could be medical records, social security records, or work records, so it is important to look for Trust certificates, and to demand that digital business continually invests in improved security – the least we can hope for is a best effort.