Hacked off

If you're reading this, it strikes me that you have just burdened yourself with yet another peice of the technological jig-saw that is, sooner or later, going to swamp us into a complete standstill. I've seen an advert for a tv gizmo that allows you record up to a terabyte of tv programmes. A terabyte! Once we had clunky old VCRs that could, fantastically, record prorammes on long play, thus doubling the space on the tape. So we went out, socialised, made babies, got drunk, worked and all sorts of things.  Then found we didn't have time to watch all those things we'd recorded.

Now we can record EVERYTHING! And.. if you delete it, apparently, you can get it back. Great. So you didn't have time to watch it in the first place, and you can get it back so as not to watch it all over again.

And this is just the base of the iceberg; we have social networking sites. OK, that's Facebook for everyone except the odd few. Twitter. E-mail. Skype. Text messaging, Instant news websites. There is more micro-information available to us about everyone we know than we ever, ever dreamed possible. or indeed, thought necessary. Hell, we even have blog sites we can pour our thoughts into, so if you're reading this...

So, with all this access to the thoughts of everyone we know, more than we can manage, what THE HELL possesses people to hack in to the phones of complete strangers and read their text messages?  Surely they must be thinking 'enough already!'?

Rupert Murdoch now claims to be a little bit deaf and forgetful, and not really able to say he knew what was going on... Well, I'm not losing my hearing, and not particularly forgetful yet.  But I am, at least in this one specific thing, just for this once, with him. Neither do I. It's all too much.

I think it's a good job I was neither important enough nor, thankfully, had I sufffered a tragedy of public interest, to have my phone hacked. (Though, who's to know? Certainly not the boss of News Demonical). If they did hack me though, what would they find? I like rugby and pass on and receive bits of news from the rugby world with my brother.  Sometimes I'm late home from work and need to tell someone. Usually my wife. And I have some friends who have, let's be brutally frank, a very dodgy sense of humour.  Not that interesting really.

So I'm torn between outrage at the diabolical liberties taken with our right to privacy, and a - probably misplaced - sense of sympathy with the hacking hacks who had to wade through the tedium and trivia of other people's lives. Like we don't have enough of it thrust at us anyway.

Oh, this was the News of the World. Stock in trade of course, the prurient prying.

Except those no trade for them anymore. Ha!