Data day snooping

Imagine a crime-free world where privacy doesn't exist; where governments and advertisers know everything about everyone. This is the world 50 years from now, according to Steven Spielberg's new film, Minority Report, where people are willing to pass on masses of personal information in return for a crime-free society.

It is fiction, yet the way we currently use and are used by technology has led civil rights campaigners to say that, with the exception of psychics detecting crimes before they're committed, many of the threats depicted in the film are already with us. Consider your own daily routine and see how much personal information you already give away.

9am: Walk to work

In London it is estimated a different CCTV camera will pick you up every 30sec. The entire journey to work will effectively be filmed across a network of cameras, of which there are 2.5million in Britain alone. Not only are these being used by the authorities, most large companies in the UK employ them as well. This data is regularly misused on the Internet and by salacious TV shows.

11am: Send or receive an e-mail

This will not only be monitored by your ISP; whether at work or home, the message can also be seen by whoever runs your mail server and your recipient's. And that's just the content of the message; the logs of whom you are sending to and receiving from will be kept automatically by the ISP. Despite the Home Secretary's recent climbdown over e-mail snooping, these logs are still available to numerous government agencies.

2pm: Buy lunch using a loyalty card

Supermarkets use loyalty cards to develop a profile of your buying habits and can link this to an address, e-mail and phone number. This information is also misused. In the US, a supermarket called Von's was sued by a customer, Robert Rivera, who'd broken his ankle after slipping in the store. Von's obtained evidence that Rivera may have been drunk at the time from a loyalty card showing regular alcohol purchases. He lost the case.

5.30pm: Phone home on a mobile

Mobile phones act like radio transmitters and receivers and, when turned on, the phone company can pinpoint its location to within about 40m in a city. With 3G phones this will come down to 10m, something that is getting advertisers excited. Firms will soon be able to pay phone companies to send text messages telling people to visit their store just as they walk past it.

7.30pm: Surf the Internet from home

All Web browsing records are stored by your ISP and, under current proposals, will be kept for seven years. While these are only available to government agencies, private companies have their own ways of tracking our Web use. For instance, US firm Double Click has been making records of access to a large number of sites. They built a huge database of people's Web habits so their clients can target their Web adverts at specific individuals.