I find this deeply worrying, but among the people I work with and my immediate circle of friends and acquaintances I am in the minority. In my experience, people just don't care that much (a fact which I find very, very sad and troubling). My partner for example who is an otherwise intelligent woman doesn't really care - her 12 year old son even less so. In fact, I'm pretty sure he will be part of the generation that will grow up to regard privacy as some sort of slightly weird, exotic commodity.

I grew up behind the Iron Curtain, and for a chunk of my life we lived with this sort of government intrusion - nay, we expected it. We expected letters from abroad to be opened and read, we expected telephone calls to be listened to and so on. Obviously, there was no judicial oversight. I remember we looked at the West with something akin to awe and longing: in the West, they don't read your mail, they don't snoop on your calls and sure as st they don't confiscate subversive magazines sent from abroad. It was like a fairy tale; in the West, they took your rights seriously.

30 years on, I look at the UK, my adopted home like a lover who fell out of love with the object of his desire. It turns out that when presented with the technical means to do so, the West is just as keen to eavesdrop and hoover up all your data: emails, phone calls, text messages, the lot.

Freedom and privacy are like a sausage comrades: you keep slicing at it until there's nothing left!