Big Brother...or Big Mother

Sometimes I wonder when people will realise how easy it is to monitor activities on Internet. Today I have read a study about monitoring employee’s e-mails. In the study most companies actually had some kind of surveillance ; checking e-mails, checking where users surfed etc etc. I do not think that this comes as any surprise to anyone within the community but every time a story like this "breaks" it seems to come as an surprise to many people. The truth is that monitoring can be done on many levels: the company you work for, the operator, the OS provider, the application provider, the search engine company, the government to name same of them...and these are only the so called good guys..you can also add the bad guys.
In the end everybody needs to take some responsibility for their own level of security (and please do not think that you are to small or to un-interesting to be threatened) but from an organisational standpoint the monitoring possibilities creates risks. The first think to ask is who to trust, internally or externally. Do you trust your operator, your users, your application provider etc etc? Then you have to ask yourself with WHAT do you trust your partners? Are you willing to hand over customer-privileged information to an external cloud company as an example? You are being watched, but there are ways to avoid unnecessary risks. Make sure that you know what you do.