The government has just announced plans to let a large number of official bodies find out who you’ve been e-mailing.
At the same time internet companies are being asked to keep records of every message you send and every website you visit for a year, just in case it’s needed in an investigation.
Local councils, the ambulance service and even the coast guard are among those who will be able to ask your internet service provider to hand over details of messages you send and receive.
The authorities won’t be able to get their hands on the contents of your messages without a warrant from a court, but many people are still worried by the proposals.
Some, including the campaigning group Liberty, think this is going too far, and don’t want people monitored when they are online.
Others are worried that people who have done nothing wrong will be investigated just because they happened to send an e-mail to someone involved in dodgy business.
Home spying
But a recent survey by the security firm Symantec seems to show that you are more likely to be watched by someone closer to home than the police.
Their survey found that two out of five British women and a quarter of men would read their partner’s e-mails if they thought they were having an affair.
The survey also discovered that three in five would look at text messages on their partner’s mobile phone.
A growing number are already putting special software onto their PCs that can keep a copy of every e-mail sent and read, as well as everything typed in a chat room and every website visited.
They are doing this without telling their partner, hoping to catch them out.
Programs to do this are easily available to buy over the internet, and once they have been installed they are really hard to spot. They’ve been designed that way.
But imagine how you’d feel if you found that your partner was so suspicious of you that they’d been reading everything you typed, or checking out which websites you were visiting?
It would be enough to break up a lot of couples, and would certainly lead to a blazing row.
Of course, if people were more careful with their e-mail, and didn’t send compromising messages, then there wouldn’t be anything for suspicious partners to find.
It’s rather like leaving hotel receipts and love letters in your coat pocket – you can’t complain if they are spotted and read.
It’s also true that some marriages break up because of cyber-romances, and e-mail and chat are probably used a lot by people having affairs.
But I think that putting snooping programs onto your home computer is taking things a bit far.
We should all be able to expect some privacy when we’re online, even from the people we’re living with.
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