We're in interesting times where technology is moving ahead at a high rate, with many consumers are being left behind, not having a clue as to what they should and shouldn't be doing. Education is one aspect that for sure would help, but most of the non-techies I know are not in the slightest bit interested in how things work and what “best practice” for the box that BT just installed is. They just want to use it. They never needed education to use their TV safely.

I think that along with some attempt at education, there also needs to be a concerted effort by the manufacturers of these so called consumer products to ensure that they are setup correctly by default, to use non-technical phrases when writing manuals, to have a native speaker do the translation into other languages (I've read some router manuals that I find hard to understand!).

Without that, it's inevitable that folk are going to end up with things badly configured, and through no fault of their own. Whilst that's the norm (which I think it is today), I think it's proper that they should have a degree of legal protection from people sniffing their conversations. Even with encryption as the norm (which would be a good thing), I still think some legal protection is useful. Do we really think that Joe Public is going to be great at picking passwords?

The key, in my head, is whether the law is applied appropriately. In Google's case, if it really was an honest mistake then they should show the data is deleted and that should be the end of it. If they were intentionally sniffing data with the aim of profiting from it in some way, then I think that would be very poor form and they should be prosecuted.

Most TVs, for example, are pretty good. You plug them in and they pretty much sort themselves out. Most IT hardware is way short of that in terms of user-experience, and it ends up with folk sending their secrets out in the clear