Technology is fun, I admit it. Sometimes we let a little bit of common sense out the door. If you give anyone any information electronically, then you must be prepared for everyone to have access to that information. Period. End of story.
Email is not confidential. Instant messaging is not confidential. The files on your computer only as confidential as the lengths you have gone to protect them.
This includes government and corporate computers. None of them are so secure as to make it impossible that information cannot be obtained by an intruder.
Why am I hopped up on this? Got an Out of Office message from someone and in 30 seconds identified that person’s home address. I was curious if something I had read recently [1] was truly this easy. If you set up something to respond to every email you get, then you are responding to any stranger that emails you.
It scares me that people trust computers so implicitly.
- Scam alert: do “out-of-office” e-mail autoreplies help burglars? (Boing Boing Blog)
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