UK Sleepwalking into a Surveillance Society

Story link: UK Sleepwalking into a Surveillance Society by Brian Turner

A new document called ‘A Report on the Surveillance Society’ is being launched at a two-day conference organised by the Information Commissioner’s Office in London.

The UK is subject to a higher level of surveillance than many other western democracies and although information commissioner, Mr Richard Thomas, acknowledges that some aspects of surveillance and information gathering are beneficial, he expresses concern in the report that the public is largely unaware of the extent to which details about their lives are already being monitored, both by public and private sector organisations.

It is estimated that there are currently around 4.2 million CCTV cameras in Britain, one for every 14 people in the population, even though a study in 2005 showed that CCTV cameras had little effect on levels of crime.

‘Dataveillance’ is used extensively by marketing companies, and in medicine, policing and border control. Around 50% of the population owns a loyalty card that is part of the Nectar scheme, while 216 UK catalogue companies are signed up to the Abacus data-sharing consortium, which has information on 26 million consumers.

There is also widespread use of Biometrics, which uses automated methods such as fingerprinting, iris scans, and facial topography to recognise unique aspects of an individual. According to the Home Office website, the UK national DNA database is the largest of any country.

Surveillance is expected to increase significantly over the next decade. In his report, Mr Thomas predicts that by 2016 technology will be extensively and routinely used to track and record people’s activities and movements. He suggests that it could have reached a level where facial recognition systems could be used to monitor people using tiny cameras embedded in lampposts and in walls.