Leader: Don’t get caught in the net

BIG Brother isn’t watching you, at least not in the Orwellian sense of the state prying crudely, overtly and threateningly into our homes. But everybody else is – watching us – with profound consequences for the way we live our lives.

Google watches us. It monitors what you view on line and tailors what if offers you in future to your search patterns. And it makes pots of money from it. Yesterday it was revealed the company made a net profit in just three months of £1.7 billion.

And we are watched, and watch, using the technology we choose. Yesterday, there was a further clamour for the latest iPhone. A great bit of kit perhaps but like other phones, it can be monitored via satellites so that where it is, and where its owner is, can be tracked.

So are we doomed to be victims of the modern big brothers, where our every call, every post, every movement is monitored by someone, somewhere? We don’t have to be, we can resist, we can revert to anti-social networking, or conversation and meeting people as it is known.

Some people who suffered this week from problems with their BlackBerry, the Blackberry crumble, said not having e-mail 24 hours a day, or internet access, or even a mobile phone was liberating. Orwell would have approved.