'Complete privacy does not exist'
The tagline for yet another reality TV show? The Wikileaks mission statement? No. This was Google, quoted from its defence against an invasion of privacy lawsuit, deposed in the United States in 2008.
Data security today is more than an increasingly pressing issue. It is a war zone - as the US government has discovered courtesy of Wikileaks. At individual level, too, the number of threats is still rising; more than half of respondents to a research survey last year commissioned by Webroot, an internet security software provider, cited a 50 per cent increase in malware attacks from the previous year.
The most obvious reason is the blurring of lines between professional and personal domains on our computers. As workforces become more mobile, employees systematically access work-related documents from personal devices and, as computers become the mainstays of our day-to-day activities, employees happily run their private lives from their work computers - 72 per cent of British workers, responding to a survey by Star, a British-based provider of IT and communication services, admitted using the company's internet for personal use during lunch hour.
To make things worse, the attitude towards protection against infection is careless bordering on cavalier.
If we were talking about real-world contagious diseases, it would probably be criminal.
