Unless otherwise protected, all data transfers, including electronic mail and FTP, travel openly over the Internet and can be monitored or read by others. Given the volume of transmissions and the numerous paths available for data travel, it is unlikely that a particular transmission would be monitored at random. However, programs, such as "sniffer" programs, can be set up at opportune locations on a network to simply look for and collect certain types of data (for example, user names, passwords, credit cards numbers, social security numbers, etc).