On the Net, they know what you are doing

The internet will hold so much digital data that it will soon be possible to find out what an individual was doing at a specific time and place, reports The Guardian.

In five years, people would be able to sit down and type into Google "what was a particular individual doing at 2.30 yesterday and would get an answer," the paper quoted Nigel Gilbert, a professor heading a Royal Academy of Engineering study into surveillance, as saying.

The answer would come from a range of data including video recordings or databanks which store readings from electronic chips, the report said. Such chips embedded in people's clothes could track their movements, Gilbert told a privacy conference in London last week. "Everything can be recorded for ever," The Guardian quoted him as saying.

Gilbert was speaking at a privacy conference at which a report by Information Commissioner Richard Thomas was

released.

In the report, Thomas said Britain is "waking up to a surveillance society that is all around us" and that such "pervasive" surveillance is likely to spread.

"Surveillance is not a malign plot hatched by evil powers to control the population. But the surveillance society has come about almost without us realizing," Dr David Murakami Wood, who headed the study, was quoted as saying.

According to The Guardian, the head of the Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) and former head of MI5 Sir Stephen Lander defended surveillance by the government. "Significant intrusion into the privacy of a small minority is justified to protect the safety and well being of the majority," he was quoted as saying.