Last night, while sitting around watching others play FIFA, a friend was filling in a passport application form for another friends brother. We’ll leave issues of what makes someone of good standing in their community to a later date, but they were stumped when it needed said friends passport number. His passport was sitting several miles away at his parents house with little chance of recovery. Until I remembered I had all of his personal information on my phone.

Over the years I’ve received a few emails. Heck, I’ve only just passed 6 digits and I’m guessing most people out there are already far beyond that. Those emails contain passwords, credit card numbers, dates of birth and national insurance numbers, not to mention passport numbers. And not just my own.

Organising flights, I’ve got a wealth of emails from friends containing their bank details and IDs. I have two-factor auth on my email accounts, combined with a long passphrase I don’t use elsewhere, but it still makes me pause when I realise the repercussions of what a breach could mean.

And as I have their data, undoubtedly other people have mine. What if one of them, maybe a bit more lax in their use of password1 on Yahoo mail, gets hacked? Would they even know what a phishing attempt could have gleaned if they manage to get access back to their account? Would they think to notify everyone who might be affected?

Email by itself is not a secure means of communication. But then again neither is the postal service and yet grandparents still send notes in birthday cards.