I'm on the train

One of the sad things that the Leveson inquiry has brought up is the number of times that victims of phone "hacking" have blamed those close to them for the release of information, unaware that their own voice mails - taken illicitly by journalists - had betrayed them. While the case of the Dowler family is uniquely evil, it is the stories of B-list celebrities that are illuminating.

If you are missing a vital piece of information, you may well end up coming to a conclusion that you would not otherwise have arrived at. In many cases this leads to embarrassment but few consequences. Most families can relate stories of the "it was the dog that ate it after all" type, usually remembered best by the injured party.

The vital piece of information that some of the injured parties in the Leveson inquiry were missing is that a mobile phone does not solely create a direct connection to someone else's ear. A phone is part device and part service. Media intrusion by phone "hacking" is pernicious, but it isn't black magic. You wouldn't protect your front door with a 4 number combination lock, with the combination "1234". 

This type of digital dysphasia is remarkably common. An email does not create a direct connection to a single other person's screen. A message in Facebook does not transfer itself directly to the minds of your friends. If I send a CD of sensitive government information over the post, there is no guarantee it will end up on only the recipient's laptop.

This has nothing to do with security; most communication tools and services are not particularly designed with security in mind. That comes a long way behind price and convenience. Indeed, social internet services are designed to increase connections. The slogan information wants to be free is not so much a call to arms as a reminder of what the gains of open communications are.

For most of human history, societies depended on a tiny set of great men and woman to make huge leaps. But only by luck or inherited wealth did their ideas come to light. (If you are still under the illusion that great people somehow rise mysteriously to the top, then it probably is worth reading Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers.) One hopes that mobile phones and the useful bits of the internet make it easier for good ideas and brains to be discovered - wherever they are and whoever has them.

Secure private communication is something that those who are no longer anonymous believe they need. The annoying man who speaks loudly on his phone in a railway carriage has got one thing right; because he is anonymous, his public wittering does not effect his privacy. You neither know nor care who he is or who he is talking to. Similarly, using Gmail doesn't effect your privacy, even though your message content will be scanned. Because so are a billion other messages.

The best way to ensure privacy in a public world also has nothing to do with security. Refer to people you know and places you go to with pet names. Use in-jokes. All of which most of us do anyway. Think about a management meeting and the indecipherable acronyms and meaningless project names used. Who could benefit from that?

There is privacy, even if everyone is listening.