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

EMAIL PRIVACY - Essay ExampleCurrently, e-mail dominates modern communication. In fact, the survey that was conducted by the Forrester Research Inc. shows that 98 percent of companies with over one molarity employees have internet access. All the companies with internet access use telecommunicate as the main formulate of communication at the organization. Email is a very new concept in communication, and it is rapidly gaining popularity. consort to Cliffon (2005), it is estimated that in America, up to 1.5 billion emails argon exchanged annually. Email Privacy Most lot are of the view that since the emails are more face-to-face, they provide a good platform for people to discuss private issues. This is never the case in most cases in fact, emails have made communication to be little 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. According to Cliffon (2005), the hackers are able to crack passwords for emails and, therefore, get access to personal schooling 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 individuals bank account thereby defrauding individuals of their lifetime investments. The internet is highly unvaccinated to malicious attacks. The process of penning an email to the time that it reaches the final user exposes information to several electronic dangers. Despite this reality, many people are ordinarily oblivious of the many privacy flaws they are exposed to when dealing with email. Crawford (2008) says that most individuals move to think that the one layer email protection by the use of password is always fit to guarantee email privacy yet the one layer password protection is not ample to protect the content o f 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 abbreviation 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 close to 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 regulate any form of political eavesdropping or espionage. In as much as traffic analysis 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 potency 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 rear of another person or any corporation. Moreover, it is worth noting that email messages can be resend to individuals more