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IT'S reckoned that the average adult Briton is seen by more than 300 different cameras from 30 different CCTV networks in a single day.
Shocking, isn't it? That we love to watch others go about their business is beyond doubt - just look at the popularity of Big Brother - but are we really that comfortable being watched?
Perhaps we are, for most of our public spaces - from housing estates to car parks, workplaces, shopping malls and main thoroughfares - are now camera-ed up.
And when telly producers get short of a cheap idea, the footage makes easy fodder with which to fill a half-hour on Britain's street-fighting, shoplifting, binge-drinking, bad-driving, exhibitionist proletariat.
It troubles me that we're apparently quite happy to be so thoroughly watched.
As much as I can appreciate the value of seeing a CCTV camera blinking away when I go into a car park alone late at night, do we really need to surrender our privacy so easily?
The latest mobile phone-based sales push is for phone tracking. It preys on media-driven fears and, potentially, plays into the hands of wrongdoers.
Initially conceived, we're told, as a means for worried parents to keep tabs on their kids, there is a slew of tracking services available online.
You register (it typically costs around 30 quid) and can then keep tabs on up to 10 mobile phone numbers.
As long as the phone is switched on, you can pinpoint it to within a couple of hundred metres.
The implications - as well as the potential abuses - are enormously sinister.
The phone tracking services I looked at all require the nominated mobile phone numbers to reply to text messages to indicate their willingness to be tracked - but what's to stop a potential stalker/assailant/voyeur from stealing a phone and replying before returning it to his intended victim?
And yet the websites I found all spoke with wide-eyed naivety about the benefits of phone tracking.
You can know where your loved ones/business partners/friends/neigh- bours/relatives are without having to trouble them with a phone call.
They'll feel safer (we're told) and you won't worry as much if you know where they are.
(By the way, please don't fire arguments at me along the lines of: "If you're not up to anything what have you got to worry about?" It's the same justification used for the National Identity Card and it could just as easily be used to validate the return of police stop-and-search powers. They are infringements of the civil liberties a previous generation fought and died for in their millions.)
Last month, two council workers in Merseyside were jailed for training a CCTV camera into a woman's home to spy on her in the bath, on the toilet, rowing with her boyfriend and watching EastEnders.
Heaven knows what possessed them to do so, given that Big Brother offers pretty much exactly the same "entertainment", but the fact is they used the technology that is intended to protect us to do the opposite.
Perhaps we should split into two groups - those that like to watch and those that like to be watched.
Trouble is, for the watchers, there are no guarantees that anything will happen; and for those being watched, who's to say anyone is actually watching?
Is such virtual anthropology nothing more than the democratisation of surveillance... or a means of surveying the end of democracy?
First published: February 16, 2006
thisisBournemouth
@ Westy and Jim. I'll have you know I'm a clean-living convent girl.