By Tom Kirkham
The UK's information commission has just issued a warning about the low level of public understanding regarding the sharing of personal details, and the implications this can have on our legal rights. Richard Thomas, the information commissioner himself suggests that Britons have woken up in a 'surveillance society' without debating its emergence.
Not so at JK Towers!
Many of my colleagues have been outraged, frustrated and more than a little concerned about their civil liberties for as long as I can remember. Some of these conspiracy theorists :o) have even gone so far as to make their feelings on CCTV and data-sharing known to the wider world.
Now I don't necessarily disagree with these concerns - I don't like the idea of my personal details being passed around the houses, or companies like Google keeping track of the websites I visit. Nor do I want to be spied upon as I head to my local supermarket, or have my groceries logged and recorded on a police database. However, I guess I just tend to take the optimistic (or maybe naive) view that as I'm not a criminal, and I don't present a significant terrorist threat, I shouldn't have anything to fear.
Despite these sentiments though, a new study from Jupiter Research has alarmed me slightly, and got me thinking about how much we the general public might be contributing to the surveillance problem. The study claims that a sizeable proportion of consumers in the US are now looking to get their hands on location-based tracking devices. While the parental uses for these devices aren't without merit, I was astonished to see that 26 percent of mobile owners in the 18-to-24 age bracket would pay extra for services that tracked friends' locations.
Is it not enough that we all have mobiles in the first place? That we all have SMS and can immediately contact one another if we realise we're going to be 30 seconds late for dinner? That we can access our email and our IM and our Facebook wherever we go? That doubtless in the near future we'll be able to do all these things on the underground and in the air as well?
This may be a US survey, but when you consider how quickly we've come to embrace and now obsess about social-networking, and how the texting revolution took off in the first place within the UK, surely it's only a matter of time before market demand crosses the Atlantic - a real cause for paranoia!
We don't need this level of insight into each others' lives. It's not condusive to improved social interaction, it won't make us any safer, and it won't stop us being late for dinner. In fact it's far more likely to breed compulsive snooping and result in distrust, anxiety, damaged relationships and goodness knows what else. Most worryingly, if we get it, there's a real chance that we won't be able to do without it.
Furthermore, once we endorse the idea of tracking and surveilling one another, it'll be a lot harder to object to our leaders doing the same thing. At least the government will be doing it to try and catch criminals - we'll just be doing it because we're weird.
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