If you went out today then there's a fair chance you were caught on CCTV. The UK may have 1% of the worlds' population but it has 20% of its' CCTV cameras. Scary, and thats not all. With the increasing expansion of the internet, many companies would love to get their grubby little mitts on your surfing history. One of these companies, Phorm, has signed up with BT, Virgin and TalkTalk to collect customers internet data to deliver more focused adverts which is causing one hell of a furore in Blighty at the moment. If for you, like me, online advertising is about as welcome as King Herod at a Jerusalem kindergarten then this is utterly pointless. I don't respond to internet advertising and generally run ad-blocker software to put a grinding halt to it, but the implications go deeper then this. At the moment this will be an opt-in deal, people have to sign up for it otherwise the ISP's will loose clients faster then Northern Rock. But what happens in the future if we do not have a choice? The UK is hardly the most liberal of countries when it comes to spying on its' citizens and internet history could be used for far more nefarious things then adverts. Insurance company? Worried some of your clients haven't disclosed their full medical history? Then why not check their web usage and see what medical sites they have visited. This kind of thing does already go on in the States where the insurance companies have people employed to check out a clients medical history and avoid paying out if possible. Us next no doubt.
Talks are continuing about combining all the UK's traffic cameras with the DVLA database so the authorities know exactly where anyone is at a given time. Combine this with mobile phone tracking and your position can be triangulated to a couple of square meters. Time to give up your car and phone and take up tree hugging in Wales.
Most of us have got no real reason to fear the Government having this data, it's them having this data and not loosing it (or giving it to the Americans) which is the real worry, and they will. Data encryption and password protection are as alien to our dicta... leaders as liberalism is to the Saudis and in the news in a couple of years we will be reading about how the entire nations web history was found in a taxi in Ealing.
I'll leave you with this thought. 50 years ago George Orwells' 1984 would probably be found in the fiction area of a library. These days you're more likely to find it under current events........ Remember, big brother is watching, and listening.
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