Mal Fletcher comments on technology creep and it's consquences

It's easy to foresee a time when, to feed the beast of predictive analysis, marketing companies will indulge in the Big Spend, to gather information on our private habits in and around the home, as seen from the skies.

Governments will obviously need to act quickly to regulate domestic drone use, but if local councils have bent the rules with CCTV, how long will it take data-hungry corporations to do the same with reference to drones?

Democracies need surveillance if they are to function as free societies and most of us are willing to trade a certain amount of privacy in the interests of personal and shared security.

Yet the shift in many countries from limited surveillance to mass surveillance of whole populations is worrying. If we're not very watchful, technology creep may be just the first step toward ever greater mass surveillance.

Chinese authorities purchased British-made CCTV cameras for use in traffic control in and around Tiananmen Square for traffic control.

However, when the student demonstrations occurred there in 1989, the same cameras were turned on the protesters.

The authorities broadcast their CCTV pictures on TV, ensuring that they were identified and turned in to the police.

Technology is amoral and, for the most part, brings huge benefits. But even those technologies that start out harmless or beneficial are all-too-often put to sinister uses unless those wielding them are subject to tight scrutiny.