When users think about the security risks of telephone calls they tend to think of eavesdropping.

FORBES: Net Phoning Is Great, Except When It's Not

Forrester's Tom Gormley argues that such service providers could become the utilities of the next century, providing an essential service with all the reliability and security of the electricity or telephone company.

ECONOMIST: Computer outsourcing

The aim of creating the senses is to make telephone conversations more realistic, and to increase security.

CNN: Phones will soon be able to smell

On the program, more about the National Security Agency and reports of a vast computer-based telephone call tracking operation.

NPR: Sen. Cornyn: NSA Phone Tracking a Useful Tool

In turn, the utility can offer its ratepayers a package of some two dozen consumer services, including Internet access, appliance protection, satellite television, long-distance telephone service, carbon-monoxide protection and security.

ECONOMIST: Electricity marketing: Not as billed | The

In many cases this is true: many office telephone systems use two-digit dates, as do some security systems, fax machines and copiers.

ECONOMIST: Please panic early

For sensitive data such as telephone numbers, postal and e-mail addresses, social security numbers or financial data, a site would have to explicitly request a user's permission to track and store the information.

FORBES: Online Advertising

"The United States doesn't have authorization by the Security Council to attack Iraq by military means, " he told CNN in a telephone interview from Baghdad.

CNN: Source: Annan expected to make Baghdad trip

Bruce Schneier, an internet-security expert, thinks it is a bit like worrying about spammers stealing a copy of the telephone directory.

ECONOMIST: A large theft of company e-mail lists causes controversy

The retired Bishop of Derry, Dr Edward Daly, told the Saville Inquiry in a telephone call that he and the Stormont MP, Ivan Cooper, went to the security forces in connection with an unexploded IRA bomb.

BBC: Bishop intervenes in Hume controversy