Firstly, the powers that be from the Pentagon to GCHQ to James Bond can (if they want to) look into every communication that pings around the planet. But these are friendly “eye in the sky” entities designed to look after us, so we need not worry too much about them.

Secondly, there is one word to encapsulate this subject and that word is “encryption”. This is not a subject we can cover fully here, but we can lead you forward to whet your appetite and direct your future thoughts on data transmission.

Think about it, you would not have possibly considered using the Internet to access your bank details when the Internet first arrived — let alone doing it from a smartphone. But we can do so now and we can do securely. So how is this possible?

The simple fact is that encryption has evolved and become a commodity that a bank (or for that matter any business) can buy in to tie down its online services. Companies who want to provide connections to mobile workers use algorithm-driven ciphers to encrypt their mission-critical data.

Allowing mobile workers access to email and even folders and files on the network is one thing; allowing mobile workers into the company database is quite another, so companies that do this will typically need to buy in specialised network-level technologies to oversee that type of work.

Then there comes the problem of different devices, different mobile networks, different types of data and different speeds of connection. It all needs the science of cryptography to tie data down and keep it under control.

Christoph Guenther writing for the SANS Institute, a cooperative research and education organisation, sums it up nicely by writing, “The Internet has enjoyed tremendous success connecting a large number of households and businesses with each other. This has created enormous economic possibilities. However, this economic potential can only be fully realised if the need for secure (i.e., safe against eavesdropping) transmission of data over the inherently insecure and open Internet can be satisfied. Cryptography addresses this need.”

Encryption now forms a fundamental part of our core PC-related phraseology and language set. We must understand this and embrace this fact as we understand and embrace cryptography itself.