Do you ever stop to think about the ways we communicate?

When you talk over the phone your call can easily be monitored or recorded. Your private life is potentially exposed, but just for a brief moment. No big deal, right? Nobody is going to be listening to you unless you're doing something wrong. But the call itself and the fact that it happened is retained for a few years by your phone company. Thus that window into your life is widened, just a little bit.

When you send someone a text message the person you're texting, your location and the message itself are also retained for a few years by your phone company. When you visit any website or use any app which requires an internet connection the same thing happens and could soon be mandatory. The window widens again.

When you chat on Facebook literally everything you're saying and in some cases what is going on in the room around you is recorded. Forever. If not by Facebook then by the governments tapped into the internet backbone. When you use Google Hangouts you record your face, what you're doing and the environment around you and hand that over forever too. It happened with Yahoo Chat, and it will happen again. When you sync your files to Drive or iCloud or OneDrive or Dropbox, you give away the very real and substantial value of the contents of your hard drive. When you sit in front of a Kinect, you invite Microsoft and probably the US government into your home to study you in intricate high-def three-dimensional detail. When you post and tag those photos of your night out on Facebook or Instagram you provide structured information to assist a powerful AI in enhancing its detailed 3D maps of you and your friend's faces and predictive models of your behaviour. And when we start wearing Google Glass around and buying devices like the Amazon Fire, we will be handing over the world around us in real-time.

Truly. Legitimately. Non-crazy like. As described in the NSA's own documents as “Collection directly from the servers of these U.S. Service Providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple.” Petabytes of it every day. Handing over our data until, as Google's CEO said, “We don't need you to type at all. We know where you are. We know where you've been. We can more or less know what you're thinking about.”

It's as if we want to do away with the window completely.

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Data retention and warrantless government spying are starting to come out as two of the biggest issues of the century. And about time too - this is a war that has been going on for decades, hidden behind the screens of software developers, tech geeks and hacker kids where everything looks technical and boring to the outside observer and prevents anyone from really paying much attention to what's going on.

There is a lot being said about what our representatives are trying to legalise here, but what is already legal? What is already going on behind closed doors?

The issue has been raised in Europe - and rejected as a violation of basic human rights. It has been raised in England - and allowed to happen against the wishes of the people. It has been raised in America - brought to light after it surfaced that the American government has been secretly storing communications from the entire internet despite this obvious conflict with their constitution. Now the Australian Government is having its turn at the grab for more power. (more)

It alarms me setting up a new phone.

Once you have linked your online accounts, whether they be @gmail.com or @mac.com or @live.com, you get to the annoying setup wizard that we all loathe and rush through. The screens wherein we mash 'next' impatiently so we can get to the end and start using it.

Nobody pays any attention to these things, everybody wants the convenience of knowing their online stuff 'just works' and that they won't lose their emails. But what is the real cost here? (more)