EMAIL PRIVACY Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

EMAIL PRIVACY - Essay Example Currently, email dominates modern communication. In fact, the survey that was conducted by the Forrester Research Inc. shows that 98 percent of companies with over one thousand employees have internet access. All the companies with internet access use email as the main form of communication at the organization. Email is a very new concept in communication, and it is rapidly gaining popularity. According to Cliffon (2005), it is estimated that in America, up to 1.5 billion emails are exchanged annually. Email Privacy Most people are of the view that since the emails are more personal, they provide a good platform for people to discuss personal issues. This is never the case in most cases; in fact, emails have made communication to be less personal since privacy in communication through emails or telephones is easily compromised. It is always very hard to write personal things on the email because a third party may see them; hence, emails are greatly compromised in terms of privacy. Ac cording to Cliffon (2005), the hackers are able to crack passwords for emails and, therefore, get access to personal information of others. Hacking presents a very precarious situation because hackers may get access to critical information such as credit number of an individual or even password for an individual’s bank account thereby defrauding individuals of their lifetime investments. The internet is highly susceptible to malicious attacks. The process of composing an email to the time that it reaches the final user exposes information to several electronic dangers. Despite this reality, many people are usually oblivious of the many privacy flaws they are exposed to when dealing with email. Crawford (2008) says that most individuals tend to think that the one layer email protection by the use of password is always sufficient to guarantee email privacy yet the one layer password protection is not sufficient to protect the content of personal or business email. Privacy Risks Due to the apparent privacy hitches in email communication, users of email are exposed to a number of risks. The reason for this is that email is highly susceptible to both active and passive attacks. Passive threats vary from traffic analysis and release of message contents. On the other hand, active threats include replay, masquerade, and altering of the contents of the message. Currently, most emails are transmitted unencrypted and this presents the danger that some unscrupulous individuals other than the designated recipient can gain access to content of the email. Such unscrupulous individuals usually have some tools that they use to gain access to the contents of the email (Quigley, 2011). The idea of traffic analysis presents the danger of evading email privacy. Traffic analysis is a routine surveillance by government through monitoring of emails as a measure to counter terrorism as well a thwart any form of political eavesdropping or espionage. In as much as traffic analysi s is justified on security grounds, this approach compromises on the privacy of emails since through the process, access to the private email messages of individuals or corporate is gained. The other potential risk with regard to email privacy is the possibility of altering and modification of the contents of the email. Using spoofing tools, unscrupulous individual can intercept an email message on transit or storage and then modify the contents of such messages. Rao and Upadhyaya (2009) argue that the other potential risk of email privacy is the issue of masquerading; it is possible for an individual to send an email in the name of another person or any corporation. Moreover, it is worth noting that email messages can be resend to individuals more