Eva Bradley: Damn, the NSA knows my chicken recipe

When I learned this week there was a possibility that US Government officials could have access to my private emails and online data, my heart skipped a beat.

It seemed my worst fears had come true; international spies would now be able to determine exactly what I'd planned to cook for dinner.

It happened like this: I realised we were out of milk (and as you may already be aware, not the lightproof variety) so I emailed my boyfriend at work to see if he could pick some up on his way home.

Quite innocently, I included in this correspondence a description of what I planned to make for dinner.

And there you have it. My private thoughts and feelings about making a Sicilian Chicken casserole laid out in black and white and allegedly able to be read by any guy in the Pentagon wearing a black suit and dark glasses.

Edward Snowden's revelations that the National Security Agency was collecting private online data about individuals worldwide has prompted a maelstrom of controversy. Civil libertarians have jumped all over the topic like happy fleas on a warm cat in winter.

Cries for investigations, deportations and lots of rolling heads have dominated headlines as people rise in collective protest against the violation of their privacy.

I have only one small thing I'd like to ask this frothing, furious crowd: why?

Although we might not like to admit it, most of us lead remarkably boring lives.

We are united in our shared ability to be of absolutely no interest to anyone but ourselves, and the closest any of us would ever come to popping up on the radar of the NSA is if we didn't check our touch typing and wrote gun instead of fun.

If you put the principle of it aside (as one should do with redundant principles far more often in my humble opinion), the only people who need to protect their privacy are the ones who have something to hide.

The rest of us simply flatter ourselves by thinking we could ever be of even the remotest interest to either the US Government or our own.

The GCSB, NSA and other wordy initialised bureaucracies have come under fire lately for snooping where some feel they shouldn't.

But patriots and civil libertarians will surely agree that sometimes the ends justifies the means and small sacrifices must be made for greater gains.

If I have to do my part by sharing with the Men in Black the secret ingredients of my chicken casserole, well so be it. I'll take that one for the team. Those who feel the privacy of their banal online conversations is more important than the pursuit of terrorists who would kill us all without hesitation should perhaps go back to licking stamps and keep their correspondence as archaic as their attitudes to privacy.

While the idea of privacy is fantastic, the reality of modern communication and commerce online is simply too convenient and unrelentingly necessary to worry about what may or - more likely - may not be scanned by a reading robot.

For the foreseeable future, I will continue to expose myself to risk by sharing my private information online.

If the Men in Black start filling out their sharp suits rather quickly I will have to conclude they have discovered my casserole recipe and possibly my lemon tart one as well. But such are the sacrifices we all must make in the interests of national security.