So, a connected world is a better world, right? This question is very much on-trend, especially in light of recent security and privacy breaches. The internet is a new frontier, and it probably is comparable with the Wild West, with no law and order yet established. In the physical world, the privacy of correspondence has been protected for centuries. Why is this assumption of privacy broken when we move to writing an email and sending it over the internet?
These days we live in the “Wild West” of the internet – from a legal perspective, the internet is almost totally unregulated. Perhaps more importantly, the effects of the internet on our society are hardly understood. It’s not just our legislators who do not understand the internet. Many (internet) engineers do not understand it either! Well, they may understand pieces of it, but only few people have a grasp on the big picture. As a society, we are learning about the effects of the internet as we go along.