> We are always under surveillance - my neighbours know I stay up late watching crap tv, the bookshop assistant knows I browse the comics section but don't buy,

> We are always under surveillance - my neighbours know I stay up late watching crap tv, the bookshop assistant knows I browse the comics section but don't buy, and a hundred people each day see me do weird or normal things. But none of this data is kept around forever, centralized, searchable and subpoena-able. Sure, in a sense, we've always been smearing our private data everywhere. But what you describe is tiny pieces of data distributed over many human agents with imperfect memories, especially with respect to the irrelevant details on the actions of the many people they encounter every day. This article is talking about databases, the largest of them owned by a handful of gigantic corporations. And even the smaller ones are just as easily accessible to the state. Hence, surveillance state. It doesn't matter that it's too much data, either. Storage is cheap, it'll just stay there waiting until someone needs to query it. And analysis and machine-learning algorithms are only getting better, to make these queries increasingly more specific, accurate and informative.