I was reading the paper the other day and read a little article in the corner what said that they (Can't remember the company) are developing a database that will log the emails you send and recieve what websites you are looking at, what searches you are making and so on...

If this does go into full time you wont really have any privacy on what you do on the internet? As it logs your emails I believe this is very bad because if you get an email what contains very important information it could get into the wrong hands who may have access to the database.

I don't understand it to well and was just wondering on what others views are on this.

That'll never happen. It's totally impractical to think you could store the contents of all the emails sent around the world or all the sites people visit.
If we assume I look at somewhere between 25 and 50 websites per day (sometimes more, sometimes less) and send maybe 30 emails every day (including work), that's a fair amount to track. Now try that over the population of a country. You'd need some serious servers to handle and store all of that.

And that's not even counting all the privacy acts it'd be encroaching on.

Quote from Dajmin :

That'll never happen. It's totally impractical to think you could store the contents of all the emails sent around the world or all the sites people visit.
If we assume I look at somewhere between 25 and 50 websites per day (sometimes more, sometimes less) and send maybe 30 emails every day (including work), that's a fair amount to track. Now try that over the population of a country. You'd need some serious servers to handle and store all of that.

And that's not even counting all the privacy acts it'd be encroaching on.

I was thinking the same thing, apperantly it is suppose to be able to log all internet activity and there are around 6 billion people in the word and say 5.5 billion people have the internet and they use the internet everyday it will just be to much to log, exactly what you said.

I just used 5.5 Billion as an example nearly everyone has a computer and the net this year.

I can't provide a link because I forgot what paper it was in.

I doubt the billions of people in Africa have PC's somehow.

Can a mod please edit the thread title to proper english?

I'm sure the last online total I read was something like 3.5 billion, which I think sounds reasonable. Covers the billion each in India and China and the combined billion in Europe and the US.

So if even only one site or email per day you'd be pushing 4 billion tracking cookies, and that would bring any server to it's knees

Quote from Dajmin :

So if even only one site or email per day you'd be pushing 4 billion tracking cookies, and that would bring any server to it's knees

Sorry, but that's ridiculous. It's that kind of reasoning that made some scientists come to the conclusion that bees couldn't actually fly...

Google seems to do very well with its load and it's not even Government funded. With the amount of money the US throws at defence they could easily afford to research and develop a system capable of monitoring and tracking all the emails sent through the world (at least in terms of technical ability when it comes to bandwidth/storage). The legalities of being able to save everyone's email and visited URLs is a much more difficult matter though. Storage servers with 1 PB in only a few cubic feet aren't too far away.

The NSA is already allegedly tapping into 300 TB of phone call information anyway.

Is it perhaps likely to see more use in corporate installations to check that staff are not "loosing productivity" and where privacy laws - whilst on work time - are harder to argue a case ?

They can do that already of course, but anything that gives bosses more power is a bad thing. *sneeks off to browse some more forums on work time*

Where I work (w00t I can haz jobz!) they already log websites visited - the machines are company owned, so is the connection, so I can't see privacy laws being broken there...?

BTW - I'm fairly sure that this is already happening. I think that a large amount of US internet data is routed through a US security base anyway...

I'm finding it increasingly hard to care about these things these days. At least I know I'm not doing anything *too* illegal on the net...

Becky, your avatar scares me. Really.

What like Echelon?

There's a difference between a company logging incoming and outgoing messages though - that won't be quite as much of a mammoth task. You won't be dealing with millions of messages that way.

But I thought Google used some kind of weird method of storing their data that resulted in surprisingly small bandwidth usage for that very reason.

Also, phone calls are a little different. They track for particular words (like "bomb" or "nuclear" etc) but at the end of any calls with no buzzwords the calls can be deleted. If you're going to do the same thing to email it'd be stupidly complicated for no real benefit (and I think the same thing applies to the phone calls). You simply replace the word "bomb" with "device" or f*cking "hamburger" since it makes no difference what you call it as long as both sides know what it means.

Let's be entirely honest here. If you were seriously planning some kind of terrorist activity, would you use a totally traceable method of communicating? If it was as easy to catch them as that, there would be no terrorism in the world.

The other big problem with this is practicality. All you need to do to circumvent it is load a game and communicate in there. Detection averted.
Or if they find a way round that, pings will be sky high and online gaming would end up in tatters.

I stand by my original comment that this is far too impractical and will never happen in the mainstream.

the us air force here thinks its good.

Quote from Dajmin :

I stand by my original comment that this is far too impractical and will never happen in the mainstream.

Your original comment was that it wasn't going to work on technical terms. Now that you've changed your comment to say it's not feasible in terms of people trying to avoid it I agree with you on that.

ECHELON isn't a new concept and the fact that there's going to be a public face to it doesn't mean that it doesn't already exist.

The NSA is apparently already doing large-scale data collection and mining (link). Claims that it is extremely costly, violates privacy, and doesn't help to catch real terrorists, may very well be true. But in the current terrorism craze, projects like these still get done.

They said that they would do that in Austria too, dunno how that evolved.

Logging internet activity should stick to school servers, office bulidings, etc. The things these people do to try to destroy net neutrality or just plain invade privacy is getting rediculous.

I dont think that the internet activity in our school gets saved, there are just some (better said many) blocked sites. If you try to go on one of them youll be logged.

If you use google they already keep a database of all searches ,ip address and location iirc and I've you use their cookies they are valid until 2038 !!

use Scroogle instead