Most Internet users were disabused of the notion that their online activities could be kept entirely secret long before the recent revelations that the National Security Agency has been tracking the phone calls and online communications of millions of people. And to a great degree, consumers have traded privacy for convenience â like having Web retailers store your credit card number to save you some typing on your next order.  Still, the scope of the governmentâs surveillance programs left some users and businesses wondering what, if anything, can be done to claw back more control over private information. The answer is complicated: most users could do more to safeguard themselves, but no software or service can protect them fully from determined government agencies, criminals or hackers.  The problem is that we have collectively ceded our privacy bit by bit as we have moved more social and business interactions from the physical realm to the so-called cloud, powered by tens of thousands of computers at server farms owned and managed by companies like Google, Amazon and Facebook. And it might be incredibly hard, if not impossible, to regain what we have given up.  While moving house recently, I came across a box of letters I had received in high school and college, some more than 20 years old. Other people cannot see those letters unless I let them, a court orders that I divulge their contents or they are physically stolen. But I canât say the same about the nine-year-old messages in my Gmail account. I might think those messages are confidential just as I might hope that my private Facebook posts are, well, private. But in reality they arenât and never were.  This is not a nostalgic lament. The Internet has no doubt made life more convenient. I can share photos with dozens of friends in minutes on Flickr, something that would have taken me days to do if I were having them printed and mailed. And itâs much easier for, say, accountants or bankers to do their jobs now that they can have a video chat with a co-worker on the other side of the planet.  Some people control the amount of information they put online; some have deactivated their Facebook accounts because of privacy concerns. But privacy settings donât shield you from government intrusion or hacking. Even without posting personal data online, most of us leave trackable traces of ourselves online every day. Your high school, university or employer might be knowingly or unwittingly putting information about you online. Just as it would be extremely hard to survive off the electrical grid, itâs become nearly impossible to live and work without e-mail or cellphones.  The supervigilant are starting to use software to encrypt their e-mail and Internet chats. Many, if not most, businesses already use virtual private networks to allow employees to connect to their computers while shutting out outsiders. Activists and dissidents in foreign countries have been using Tor, which attempts to obscure usersâ digital trails by breaking up and sending their Internet traffic on multiple paths. But such technologies all have limitations, and users have to be technically adept and diligent to gain any benefit.  The fact is, the privacy war is asymmetric. Governments have spent billions to develop tools to conduct surveillance and hack into computer systems. Far fewer resources have been devoted to protecting users from such intrusions, said Seth Schoen, the senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an advocacy and research organization. New technical tools might put up a privacy screen for a while, but over time intruders will come up with new ways to get around them, too. There may be no stopping that cat-and-mouse game, but at the very least we can demand that lawmakers protect us from abusive and unwarranted surveillance by the government.
We gave up our privacy for the convenience of the Internet, and it may be too late to reclaim it.