Privacy Is Important.
Posted by Cloud Net on Mon, Aug 02, 2010 @ 10:49 AM
Privacy is important to us all. This is not because we want to do
something illegal, as the government seems to thinks. It's because every ailment I get seems to be embarrassing and I have no wish to share that with the world, and frankly I don't want to know about yours either. When I talk to the man who claims to be my bank manager, I don't want anyone else listening. When I negotiate a contract I don't want the other person to know my bottom figure. So if I want to have a private chat on the phone what should I do?
The worst option is to pick up my mobile in a crowded building or a train and assume that no one will listen. In any case the mobile phone is like a homing beacon transmitting your position back to your network provider every few minutes or so who then records the information. So not only do they know where you are, they know where you've been. Worse than that, all of the conversations go through Echelon, the government's spy network, so they know what you said.
The only protection you have is the amount of noise and pointless talk around you which make it difficult for anyone else to hear your particular news. If it is really important stuff you are talking about then it is dead easy for any self respecting spy to use his receiver to pick up your broadcasts on his receiver.
Normal landlines are pretty awful as well. Your phone call goes out unencrypted in real time along a copper wire. It is so old-fashioned Queen Victoria's spies could have eavesdropped on this technology. It takes a matter of seconds for anyone to simply clip a transmitter to the cable and listen in. It is stupidly simple and virtually undetectable. The only reason that more of this doesn't go on is because of the amount of drivel that we all spout which makes it difficult to pick out the important stuff.
I'm afraid that VoIP services aren't perfect either, but they are better. Your phone call is translated in the phone into a series of data packets which are then sent over the Internet to the person that you are calling. This means that it is almost impossible for anyone to find out where you are. It is true that the data packets can be "sniffed" out and deciphered so that a determined hacker could hear a conversation. However finding the one useful conversation amongst the billions of other things going on is not the simplest thing to do.
If privacy is really important to you then you can agree with your caller to encrypt the VoIP phone calls which makes it impossible to capture the conversation within a reasonable period.
So of the three phone systems that are available to you, if privacy is important to you, you should clearly choose VoIP and, of course, we would recommend business-class, hosted VoIP by Cloud Net.
Written by David Hill, Chairman, Cloud Net.