We are not alone

Lost the whole of my contact details last week when I wanted to synchronise my iphone with the laptop at my workplace. Somebody told me about mobileme services from Apple in the past but I never bothered to check it out until the tragedy occurred last week. I signed up for a 2 months free trial service period and so far everything works well. My contacts are now synchronised through the cloud.

Hang on, if information that I keep could be transferred without my intervention, does this mean that it could be breached easily as well? If we consider the episode where some Middle East countries requiring Blackberry to allow their enforcement agencies to access information of users for "security" reasons, does it mean that our private data are not really private at all. The silence of the more sophisticated agencies such as the CIA and MI5 could mean that they have access to these data all the while!

I suppose living in the present world requires us to make trade-offs in many ways. Privacy against security and convenience could be some of the choices. Many people now have accounts on social network platforms such as Facebook. They share a number of stuff including their private data. Some may share their thoughts, views or give comments which may expose themselves to all sort of risk, immediately or very much later.

The more scary scenario is if technology which enables data security to be breached falls into the wrong hands. When intimate information could be transmitted around the globe between servers, some crooks somewhere could also be tapping information which they could use later. This is a possibility which we should not discount. Therefore, we must be mindful of what and where our data is kept and how we share them with people who we are dealing with.

As technology becomes more advance and more services such as mobileme are rolled out, we have to be more alert about the risk of the breach of our private data and need to decide how much risk we are ready to assume.