The National Security Agency (NSA) has been running the PRISM program and collecting mass amounts of data from people's phone and internet habits for six years now. Started in 2007 by the FBI and NSA, the program allows them to pull audio, video and other data from the internet as well as to monitor phone calls. It's subject to strict authorisation from Congress and a special court, and has been repeatedly passed; so the government obviously feel they have good reason for it.

When it hit headlines this week the US government's official stance was that the monitoring of activity is necessary in order to scan for terror threats. President Barack Obama summed it up when he said, "You can't have 100% security and also then have 100% privacy and zero inconvenience. We're going to have to make some choices as a society."

So soon after the Boston Bombings, most people seem content to accept this defence. 56% of Americans approve of phone-data collection, 45% approve of e-mail monitoring and a huge 62% believe that the sacrifice of personal privacy is worth it in order to investigate terror threats. 

Of course, not everyone is happy with these developments. Conservative activist Larry Klayman is leading a lawsuit against the CEOs of Apple, Facebook, Google, Youtube, Microsoft, Skype, Yahoo!, the NSA, President Barrack Obama and others involved in the data collection. Klayman claims that the "spy program" is a gross invasion of privacy, an "Orwellian power-grab" that will "blackmail the masses into submission". The American Civil Liberties Union has also launched legal action amid claims the program is "unconstitutional". Could the government really use the data they've collected to blackmail its citizens, though?

The thing is, online data collection has been going on for years, and most people that aren't totally oblivious when it comes to technology have known this. Ads targeted specifically for you based on previous searches and keywords have been staple features of search engines and social media sites for a long time now, and everyone seems okay with this. Most smart phones use a variety of techniques to track people's locations, and while the mobile companies could use this information for their own means most customers are fine with it, not least because it helps to locate missing people and can provide evidence for other crimes.

The NSA maintains that the collection of data that has caused this media storm is nothing untoward and that citizens shouldn't be concerned. Legal scholar Daniel Solove says, "The NSA data surveillance, data mining, or other government information gathering programs will result in the disclosure of particular pieces of information to a few government officials, or perhaps only to government computers. This very limited disclosure of the particular information involved is not likely to be threatening to the privacy of law-abiding citizens." In other words, if you haven't done anything seriously illegal, you have nothing to worry about.

Solove purports that the issue here is not one of privacy, but of the power government institutions hold over their citizens and the inherent imbalance there. Knowing that the government is watching isn't likely to change the type or amount of information people put online; a lot of it is basic information that the government could easily access through other means if they really wanted to, anyway. But it "affect[s] the power relationship between people and the institutions of the modern state" because the people are denied the chance to have an input as to how the information collected about them should be used.

Obama has stressed that "Nobody's listening to the content of people's phone calls" - they're monitoring phone numbers and call durations, not names or actual content. The government and NSA aren't randomly checking your Facebook newsfeed, or trawling through your Google search for a decent kebab place at 3am last Saturday, however.

They submit requests to internet and telecommunication companies to be sent data on specific people of interest - people who are suspicious, or who have ties to suspicious groups. So if you don't do anything to attract the attention of government agencies, it's unlikely that they're going to care about your latest Skype session. 

Aiming for transparency, Google has released information of how it provides data to the government. Although details of requests submitted under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FSI) are not allowed to be discussed, most companies implicated in the scandal have asserted that the government and the NSA do not have direct access to their servers. Google spokesman Chris Gaither told Wired, "When required to comply with these requests, we deliver that information to the US government - generally through secure FTP and in person. The US government does not have the ability to pull that data directly from our servers or network."

This goes against initial reports that the tech companies had special software and equipment installed at their headquarters that allowed the NSA direct access to their data. However, when asked whether Google had been approached about installing such equipment, Gaither did say, "We have been asked to do things in the past and we have declined."

Facebook, Microsoft and Google are asking for exemption to laws regarding the non-disclosure of information regarding the FSI so they can openly publish the statistics of how much data they give the NSA; both companies claim that it falls well below the current claims being made by the media and that only a small proportion of their users are ever targeted. Facebook General Consul Ted Ullyot wrote, "We urge the United States Government to... allow companies to include information about the size and scope of national security requests we receive".

Until those numbers are released there is going to be on-going speculation and fear regarding how badly people's privacy is being invaded. But perhaps it's important to remember that we have all always known that the internet has been collecting our data. Once something is online, there's no way to get it back or destroy it, and we've always been aware of this. If you've got nothing to hide, then you have nothing to worry about. 

The surveillance isn't akin to the Big Brother situation present in Orwell's 1984 and it's unlikely that people are going to change their online or phone habits. Most of the things people post online are put into the public domain because they want as many people as possible to see it, anyway. The government isn't going to care unless you're posting illegal or threatening material, and if you are, you're a fool for posting it online in the first place and you deserve to be put under surveillance and charged.

So maybe we need stop focusing on the privacy issue and start looking into improving the relationship between the institutions that hold our data and us, the users. Maybe it doesn't matter so much if they're collecting our data, so long as they let us have a say in what they do with it.