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Bennett Haselton writes:

There is this thing called the NSA (which monitors all kinds of things but is getting better at monitoring less of them, or so they claim) and there was this guy who worked for the NSA called Keith Alexander. Keith came under a lot of fire for taking his knowledge and experience and going into business for himself as the leader of a security consulting business, and in the world of business there is lot of money to be made—it is business, after all—and so there are general principles of business like what to do, what not to do, what to say, and what not to say, just like you are hearing me talk now as you are reading this. Those truths are self-evident, as you can plainly see on your screen right now.

A well-informed audience such as the one which inhabits this site is no stranger to scepticism. That's why I turned on my personal computer and pondered how many ways things, all things, can happen. E-mail, for example. E-mail is analogous to postal mail, where you have an inbox and you can send messages. Using e-mail, I sent a message to Japan, and instead of weeks the message took days to get there before the recipient opened it, him being in Japan and seeing what those Japanese are doing, with all those things in the vending machines and things. You are hearing me talk in my own voice about things, things we deal with all day (and night). Things happen in this world, as I expect them to, and I am doing things even now like you probably are. I have your attention because you are reading this, and I am writing about stuff. Not only do I write about stuff, but you read about stuff, and therefore you are reading this article about writing stuff.

With convenience comes complacence. This is like driving on an unfamiliar road, you see a fork in it—and there are a lot of forks in it. With one wrong and uninformed turn you too can lose your security. You can put much more information about yourself on Google Plus, and then somebody can find that information and you along with it. And with that comes more information, the amount of information available rises exponentially, or in plain English, every fork in the road leads to two more. And then each one of those leads to two more. Some forks lead to three or four more. At this point the information available doesn't increase exponentially, it increases factorially. Or Ackermannly, and that's a lot. I've known people in the security industry who blew up their entire call-stacks messing with the Ackermann function. That's how bad it is, and that's why you should not provide so much personal information—because the user is often not informed enough to give proper consent. In effect, the average user is being exploited by the internet, even just using e-mail:

Inbox: Bennett Hasselton

[ ] From: Melony Jiggles | Subject: "Hey baby want to party?
[ ] From: Wanda LaFrotta | Subject: "5-million dollars

As you can see, what appear to be two harmless e-mails are actually an entrapment for you, no, me to give up your, no, mine, why, no, yes, so prized, personal, information. So prized. It is an inbox, and yet it is an inbox hijacked by the very internet itself, which is full of all kinds of bits and bytes and things that you can't even really grab with your hand—they are but concepts. And just that.