#48: The Sealing Wax

It’s like the PIN on your mobile phone stopping prying eyes from reading your Facebook messages (especially the ones written late at night, probably under the influence of alcohol).

There’s something reassuring about a blob of red wax creating a physical barrier between a usurper and your message. There’s also something incredibly satisfying about sliding a knife under the seal and prising the letter open. It takes us back to a time of physical message sending and privacy, a time when the padlock symbol of your anti-virus software was a literal metal object preventing unwanted intruders.

Privacy was no doubt much easier pre-internet, but then more thought was probably put into the sharing of messages than the random assortment of words I garble into my Messenger app, waffling with the reassurance that I can easily and immediately clarify or explain (or possibly apologise). Among closest friends, messages become a kind of stream of conscious: ‘Omg I just saw a dog. This dog is so cute. I need this dog. Oh it disappeared lol. What are you doing on Tuesday?’

Would we even bother to light a candle, melt some wax, and press our initial in order to protect such rubbish?

Possibly not.

But there are other messages, the exchange of addresses, the time and place of a meeting, or of course, the sharing of your deepest darkest secrets, that you do not want everyone to read, especially, in terms of the latter, your mum.

Some parents see this as a matter of safety, though. They use apps that can track their children’s online presence, tampering with the wax seal when their child isn’t looking. Is this about a lack of trust in the child, a fear for their genuine safety, or just any parent’s natural desire to nosy into their child’s life?

The problem is, with the expanse of the internet, a lot is at stake. This is not a bit of wax protecting a few words on a piece of paper. This is a digital world full of potential risks, of people with less than decent intentions. A world where the intrusion of privacy is not as clear as the breaking of a wax seal.

Scare-mongers constantly spark fears about online security, about the amount of data you are unconsciously sending to big companies simply by using their services. It’s a difficult field to navigate, to have an opinion in: I don’t want Mark Zuckerberg to read my Facebook messages, but equally I’m not convinced he ever will.

I suppose I could tell everyone to return to paper and carrier pigeons, to use their signet rings to stamp wax instead of to increase their edginess.

But let’s face it, it’s 2017 and I have a million unread Facebook messages to deal with.