Big Brother is closing in, but it's not too late to fight back...

‘If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”

Who said this, do you think? Stalin? J Edgar Hoover? Well, no: in fact, it was Eric Schmidt, chief executive of Google. Schmidt has an estimated personal wealth of about $6 billion and controls one of the biggest internet companies in the world. So we ought to take what he says seriously, even if – especially if – we disagree with it.

Why? Not simply because, in one blunt, bland phrase, this extremely powerful and completely unaccountable man has casually erased our right to privacy, but because 10 or 20 years from now his statement might not seem outrageous at all. It might, indeed, be considered utterly normal and unobjectionable. If our children grow up in Schmidt’s brave new world – a world of CCTV cameras in classrooms and intimate revelations posted on the internet – then how will they even know what they are losing? The entire notion of privacy as a human right is being eroded, and at a speed which is frightening.

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You are perhaps old enough to be shocked and angry about all this, as I am, but what’s most worrying is that our children won’t be. They are growing up in a world where remote-controlled cameras are everywhere, where their friends post pictures of them drunk or naked on the internet, where our nightly entertainment often consists of watching real people break down in tears or humiliate themselves on live television. It hardly requires much of a science-fictional leap to imagine their children’s DNA, fingerprints, iris scans, hourly movements, home environments, bank details, their most intimate conversations, being monitored and recorded from cradle to grave. Our children are being desensitised to the idea of their private lives being public property. What will you answer when your son or daughter asks: “Daddy, what does ‘privacy’ mean?” Full story...

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