A few days ago I showed my friend Rick an amusing back-and-forth I was having with my girlfriend over messenger. Nothing significant – just a daft conversation that I screengrabbed and sent his way. Much hilarity ensued.

When I reflected upon the situation, however, my behaviour struck me as being concurrently deeply weird, and yet, entirely representative of society’s current modus operandi.

Humans have always been in the business of relaying private conversations to interested third parties. The difference with today’s digital discussions is that we no longer have to explain the basic essence of the conversation – we can literally just share the exchange verbatim.

We live in an age in which people routinely show one another text messages from lovers, suitors, haters and reprobate(r)s. In which employers monitor their employees’ emails, while employees routinely forward on messages that they find offensive, or funny, or slightly objectionable, or for no apparent reason other than malice.

It’s a world in which people even look over the shoulders of total strangers on tubes, trains, planes and buses, so keen are they to snoop into the private lives of others. And if those around you aren’t reading your ‘private’ correspondence, you can bet that Google and Facebook are.

I’ve lost count of the amount of times a colleague or client has copied a third party into a private email exchange of mine without due consideration to its contents or the impact of sharing them more widely. Doubtless I’ve done exactly the same thing myself, even though this type of behaviour drives me mad. I’ve also lost count of the amount of times I’ve been shown a private, deeply personal text message that was clearly not meant for my eyes, or anyone’s eyes, other than the original recipient. It seems no written correspondence is ever really private anymore.

Maybe t’was ever thus. The written letter always carried with it the risk of being intercepted or shared with unintended readers; entire histories have been compiled on luminaries from the past based on their private writings.

And yet, this feels different. It’s the ease with which a person can now relay the private musings of another, combined with a shift in behavioural patterns – the normalisation of sharing. We’re so used to sharing links, pictures, articles and, of course, our personal thoughts and feelings on social media, we seem to have decided that not only is it our prerogative to broadcast our own thoughts, but to indiscriminately share those of our peers too.

I’ve always been particularly sensitive to the perils of committing thoughts and sentiments in writing. On several past occasions I’ve had my private correspondence pored over and scrutinised without my permission. Indeed, after the third and most egregious intrusion, I vowed never to write anything down again, to keep every last one of my private thoughts safe in my own head (sadly this proved impossible due to inadequate storage facilities).

Now I find myself in a world in which such privacy violations occur as a matter of course. And worse still, I’m just as guilty of participating in this underhand information exchange as anyone else.

Where do we go from here? Well, if you want your private thoughts to stay private, it may be better to avoid putting them down in writing and save them instead for that rarest of occasion – a face-to-face interaction with a trusted friend.