Mal Fletcher comments on technology creep and it's consquences

To paraphrase Parkinson's Law, security measures will increase to fill the space allowed them.

In 2008, a minor furore erupted in the media when a borough council in Dorset admitted to spying for two and a half weeks on a family who, it thought, were cheating on a local school's admission system.

The council's representatives were trying, they said, to ascertain whether the family were telling the truth about the school catchment area in which they claimed to live.

They were doing nothing illegal - 'playing the system' may not be totally honest, but it isn't a crime. Yet their movements were tracked using technologies and systems set up to trap terrorists and criminals.

The 600 or so local authorities in the UK are relatively free to use their discretion in using certain surveillance powers. However, those powers were set in place to prevent crime and terror activities; not to keep track of private citizens going about their business.

The law stipulates that the use of surveillance must be necessary and proportionate. In the Dorset case it was neither.

Another side of the privacy debate came to light again earlier this month when the European Court of Justice ruled that people have the 'right to be forgotten' by internet search engines.

Its ruling has forced Google, and by extension other search providers, to institute a process through which people can request the removal of specific personal references from their search results.

In the lead up to the Court's decision, the UK government announced its opposition to such a law, arguing that it offered people unrealistic expectations about online privacy. The controls offered, it said, would do little about the spread of information across websites but may impinge on freedom of expression.

Time will tell. What is already clear is that the ruling will lead search companies to introduce more intrusive advertising to cover the costs of dealing with the thousands of applications they will face.

The ruling may also mean that courts will be tied up with lawsuits, brought by complainants who don't feel they're being properly serviced.

At the same time, though, it will likely launch a much needed debate about what privacy means in the age of Big Data analysis, algorithms and cyber-bots. This is no bad thing.

A public debate is sorely needed on the vexed question of who actually owns the information stored on the internet. Is it the individual concerned, the search company, or the wider society?

The European Court's finding certainly shows how badly we need a new branch of ethics to focus on issues relating to the Big Data revolution.