The most anti-climactic e-mail scam of the century since my friend hacked my Yahoo! account and sent lascivious e-mails to my boy-crush in junior high has brought Sarah Palin’s e-mail history to the public arena. Bloggers have interpreted this lackluster exposé as a call for better e-mail security, but Palin’s not-so-incriminating e-mail history proves another point: keep your scandals off the Internet and you won’t have to worry.

While e-mail security is a big, big issue, there are a number of ways a hacker can read yours — from hacking your server to Googling your personal info. It’s easy to hack e-mail when your password entry page isn’t encrypted. You’d be surprised how many other sites are not secure; banks and other websites without an SSL, that “https://” that comes before the URL, pass your information across servers freely and openly. In these cases, much more is at stake than your worst office gossip, but even this is relative: your identity is worth significantly less than it used to be, simply because identities are so easy to obtain. (Even that Lifelock guy got hosed after making his S.S. public.)

This is only the advanced version of hacking. Our Palin hacker simply had to reset her password, using basic information about her to gain access to a password reset. My grandmother could do that. It’s so easy, I still can’t believe it’s a felony. Speaking of felonies, Bill O’Reilly wants to implicate the media companies that spread information from those e-mails, and uses a hilariously inappropriate analogy to justify his position:

As far as technology can make us reassess every copyright law and First Amendment right we have, what we’re really interested in is protecting our own butts. I don’t care if the person who hacks me goes to jail; I care that half of America knows that I “really hate Coldplay” or I think “someone needs to feed SamRo a burger.”

Unlike the threat of identity theft, we’re talking about information that, at worst, might show that you’re a human being. We’re coming to a point where the ubiquity of information is making information less valuable; there is so much of it that we have to choose what to acknowledge and what to ignore. Plenty of people have wondered why people choose non-secure e-mail servers like Yahoo!, and the mass use of the user-friendly servers shows, ultimately, that people don’t care. If Sarah Palin doesn’t have any good dirt in her inbox, you can be sure Sarah Pappalardo doesn’t either.