Global Economic Crash

verybody has something they regard as being nobody's business but their own. This does not mean that they are up to no good, that they have a scandalous secret buried deep in their closet. Merely that there are details about their lives - from the mundane (their unlisted home telephone number perhaps) to the serious (such as treatment for a hereditary illness) - that they prefer to keep in a protected space marked private. Increasingly, however, our freedom to define a private space for ourselves is being restricted. The government and its agencies, while keen to keep their own secrets, are less willing to allow us ours, handing themselves new powers that let them steadily map our private lives.

Just as chilling is how much is known about us by corporations which are busy compiling extraordinarily detailed databases of our everyday transactions. The result is that the most trivial nuggets of data are taken out of our control and scrutinised to almost microscopic levels by hundreds of different organisations.