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“But the terms and conditions, as recently as March, contained no link to a privacy policy, which could be interpreted as enabling Google to use any personal data gathered from your hard drive as it sees fit, now or in the future.”

Telephones, too, are less private than most people realise. In 2002, law enforcement groups made more than 400,000 requests for data from mobile network operators. The American military intelligence base at Menwith Hill in Yorkshire listens in to calls and uses complex software to pick out particular words and phrases.

Some of the things that we consider most deeply private are contained in our medical records: a history of depression, a sexually transmitted disease, a long-ago abortion, recovery from drug addiction or a suicide attempt. The National Health Service has embarked on a £12 billion IT project that will upload millions of patients’ medical records onto a database, freely accessed by 250,000 NHS staff and, to a lesser degree, by private health companies, council workers, commercial researchers and ambulance staff.

It might as well be public. Thomas has already encountered cases of private investigators, aided by insiders, raiding government and company databases such as the police national computer and the DVLA’s vehicle computer, as well as those at the Department for Work and Pensions. Doctors fear that when the openness of the database is understood, patients may stop telling GPs their secrets. The health department is unbothered: “The citizen has no right to stipulate what will and will not be recorded . . . nor where those records will be held.”

Similarly overreaching is the trial run of the 2011 census, unveiled last week, which will require details about health problems, how often couples spend the night together and whether they have a second home, and personal income. Experts say that the additional intrusion may lead to people making false returns.

So much for the public sector. As consumers we are closely watched, too. In some parts of the country, the company behind Nectar cards keeps information on 90% of the local population. Nationwide, more than half of us carry one of its cards. One of my close relatives regards me as frankly insane not to have one. Why deprive myself of all those discounts? It’s like walking past a pile of free money and not taking any.

I don’t want somebody to “own” all that information about me. The information commissioner’s report confirms my misgivings. Even if the company behind the Nectar card conducts itself impeccably today, Thomas warns, it may not always do so. He recently criticised commercial organisations such as HSBC, NatWest and Royal Bank of Scotland for dumping details of customers’ accounts on the streets. They face unlimited fines.

Katherine Albrecht is the founder of Caspian, an American organisation set up to oppose invasions of privacy by supermarkets. She is not anti-business: on the contrary, she holds a business degree. But “my passion happens to be preserving personal freedom, staving off totalitarianism, and resisting Orwellian intrusion”, she said.

Spychips, a new book which Albrecht co-wrote with Liz McIntyre, describes controversial uses of radio frequency identification (RFID) which uses tiny microchips to track everyday objects, animals and even people using radio waves. In Cambridge, Tesco tested RFID by inserting chips into certain goods deemed “vulnerable” to shoplifting. The chips instructed CCTV cameras to monitor the person who had picked up the goods. It is unclear whether the tags remain active after leaving the store. Groups such as Liberty are worried that individuals could be profiled and tracked without their consent by means of a tag embedded in a shoe. This could associate them with, for example, attendance at events such as political rallies.

A supermarket might not care about our attendance at rallies but others might; and how would the information be protected? “Boundaries between state and private sector interests are blurring,” the information commissioner’s report warns, “as more tasks of government are carried out through a sometimes complex combination of public, private, voluntary sector and market mechanisms.”

On the BBC’s Question Time last week, Charles Clarke, the former home secretary, said glibly that people who wished to reduce the amount of information gathered about them could do so by choosing not to keep a bank account and never visiting the doctor.

Giving up the bank account and using only cash may not provide a long-term escape: Hitachi has been working with the European Central Bank on the idea of putting RFID chips into Euro banknotes.

A surveillance society does not only affect privacy, Thomas warns. It is also about mutual trust. After the London bombings, television stations and police encouraged us to film suspicious activities on our mobile phones. “All of today’s surveillance processes bespeak a world where we know we’re not really trusted,” says the report. “Social relationships depend on trust and permitting ourselves to undermine it in this way seems like slow social suicide.”

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