The governments and companies are scrambling to catch up, but ordinary people have not been educated about the privacy risks of today. Some people think encryption is the big fix it all to the problem of personal privacy. Sources say, the government's standard encryption, DES, can be broken in about 7 seconds. Some people have been said to be able to break it without a computer. The latter we would not doubt.
Software programs try to learn about the users and send the information to the companies.
Microsoft tried to release Win98 with code that would send out information about what was on user's hard drive. Lucky the Government stepped in and prevented Microsoft. The government is trying to get things, such as keyescrows passed as laws where by you have to give a government a secret key, or backdoor, to be able to unencrypt your files. If the laws are passed it would make it illegal for a person to encrypt a file and then not give the government a backdoor key. The government is pushing clipper chips and many other ridiculous encryption legislation.