KalChoedan

They don't need to be your friends. They merely need to be the agents trusted explicitly to maintain your privacy whilst delivering your communications. This concept has been the foundation of industries such as the postal service for... well, quite some time.

Kids taking advantage of an unlocked phone to post something outrageous to facebook is not remotely similar to the sort of breach of trust we are talking about, that is completely non-sequitur.

EDIT: Also - if you are basing your estimation of "the world we live in" on the behaviour of teenagers in a high school classroom, to coin a popular reddit phrase, you're going to have a bad time. That's a completely farcical argument.

EDIT2: Thank you for the Reddit Gold, kind internet stranger!

What? No we haven't. We've learned that GCHQ has been tapping into transatlantic fibre connections and sharing the information gleaned thus with the NSA and other allies, with only nominal oversight. We've also learned that most of the media can be pressured into not reporting on any of this via D-notices and the like.

I don't know what story you've been following, but it certainly isn't the same one the rest of the world has been seeing.

Poppycock. Of course you can entrust a friend to carry a private note, have a reasonable expectation they will not read it, and feel betrayed and outraged if they breach that trust and read it anyway. What you are suggesting is ludicrous.

*delusional

The existence of the postal service alone nonetheless refutes your claim that data cannot be privacy protected.

You can carry the data and by necessity therefore have access to the data, and still not breach the fundamental trust given to the carrier by taking advantage of that access and "reading the note".

You seem to be suggesting that because someone can read the data, they should and will read the data, and that therefore nobody can ever have any expectation of privacy in any context where their "message" passes through a third party's "hands".

That is quite clearly not true and the existence of postal services throughout the world (and throughout history, the USPS is far from the only example) prove it ably.