The UK's information watchdog warned, during the week, of a danger of the UK "sleepwalking into a surveillance society". Richard Thomas, the information Commissioner, was most concerned about the national identity card scheme, a population register planned by the Office for National Statistics and a proposed database of children which includes their fingerprints. 

When I bought a DVD player this morning I was incredulous I had to fill in a form for "TV Licensing", giving my name, address and whether I had a colour or black and white TV. All this will be fed back into the TV database to ensure no one eludes paying their TV licence. Incredible!

Who is TV Licensing? It's actually "a trading name used by companies contracted by the BBC to administer the collection of television license fees and enforcement of the television licensing system."

George Orwell seems  increasingly to have been a prophet rather than a novelist. Now you can't even buy a small electrical appliance without it being entered in a central database.

Add a comment

 | Link | back to top |

Add to that the information that you have to supply the local dry cleaner just to get your suits cleaned and the fact that you will be caught on CCTV numerous times a day whilst going about your normal life, you begin to wonder if privacy of the individual is something that we lost without ever realising that we lost it????