One of the problems with the digital society is that it’s hard to evade. There’s an increasing dependence upon digital data whether we like it, loathe, understand it or pretend to live in ignorance.

It’s the unasked for dependency which makes us vulnerable in different ways.

We have some limited choice whether we watch television or not (although it is hard to totally avoid television, as one example, Liverpool Street station shows BBC News; the Tesco nearby has Sky TV on while people queue. I have even been on a train which had televisions on it - showing the same 20 minute programme over and over again).

Many transactions are recorded whether we like it or not; all ATM use for cash; all credit card transactions; medical details; payment, non-payment and late payment of taxes; and so on….and so on; that’s before we get to all our internet activity being monitored and monitored and monitored.

At one level the technology itself seems to be creating a move to record everything, regardless of whether it has any value or interest. It’s the just-in-case-syndrome; building vast electronic audit trails for use in some potential future…future what?

And the justification for some of this stuff - and it is costing us all a lot of money - is very, very poor. Do we need a smart card with our medical history on? No we don’t. For years I’ve had a donor card which must have cost a few pence to make. Good enough if I drop down dead and there’s any use for my key organs. I would have thought the biggest danger any of us facing a trip to the nearest hospital is not so much that we don’t have a ’smart card’; it’s much more that we’re likely to catch some hideous bug. There are apparently over 4,500 deaths a year in UK hospitals because of infections - caused in the main by the drop in standards as hospital cleaning was privatised by the Tories (and never un-privatised by ‘New’ Labour). I don’t know what the fatalities are because of the absence of smartcards.

But one of the key problems here is that we have no choice about the collection of so much of this data in the first place. This dependency on digital environments has the intrinsic potential to erode whatever it is we mean by ‘civil liberties’ and ‘human rights’. The core technologies in use, as is, with the existing power relations and unequal privileges, have an intrinsic undemocratic character to them.