The key point is interpretation and use of the data. I don't particularly mind CCTV coverage of cities, if we still live in 1970 and technology limits it to es

The key point is interpretation and use of the data. I don't particularly mind CCTV coverage of cities, if we still live in 1970 and technology limits it to essentially manual viewing of feeds to follow criminal suspects. In that world, ordinary citizens walking around a city centre are items of data that are discarded forever as soon as the tape reels run out. Even if they're kept, the volumes of data involved are so huge that they're effectively lost in time anyway. The world we live in today is not that world. We are not far from being able to use facial recognition to track the whereabouts of every single citizen and save it forever, indexed along with the video recording of them at the time. We already have the capability to do that using cellphones. We can save the entire life history of individuals using these records and collate them into a viewable form near-instantly. As I alluded to in my earlier post, the way we're going it's not a huge leap to imagine voice recognition allowing for phone calls to follow suit. Why is voice recognition important? Because it turns weeks and weeks of trawling through transcripts into a search query with instant results. It's a completely different ball game. It's permanent, searchable, indexable super-fast memory. 'Forgetting' becomes obsolete. In the old world of tape CCTV cameras, my neighbours knew more about me than the Government. Now, it's almost certainly the other way around, and if not, only because they've decided not to type 'stegosaurus' into the Big Database of Everything.