A surveillance society?

A two-day conference organised by the Information Commissioner's Office begins in London today, to coincide with publication of a document entitled "A Report on the Surveillance Society".

Among western democracies, citizens of the United Kingdom are subject to some of the heaviest levels of surveillance.

The Information Commssioner, Richard Thomas, warned in 2004 that the country is in danger of "sleepwalking" into a surveillance society.

While acknowledging the undoubted benefits of certain aspects of surveillance and information gathering, his concern is that people are not aware of the extent to which details about their lives are already being monitored, both by public and private sector organisations.

And inevitably, surveillance is set to increase over the next decade. Here are some statistics relating to the extent of personal surveillance of citizens in the UK.

Video Surveillance
Though photographic surveillance has existed since the 19th century, the use of video CCTVs has soared since the 1990s.

• There may now be as many as 4.2 million CCTV cameras in Britain - one for every 14 people.
• A person can be captured on over 300 cameras each day.
• In the 1990s the Home Office spent 78% of its crime prevention budget on installing CCTV.
• Yet a study in 2005 concluded that CCTV schemes have little overall effect on crime levels.

Databases
Databases now allow high-speed cross-referencing of large amounts of data.

• "Dataveillance" is used extensively in marketing, medicine, policing and border control. For example, 50% of the population now own a loyalty card that is part of the Nectar scheme, providing an invaluable insight into individual consumption patters.
• 216 catalogue companies in the UK are signed up to the Abacus data-sharing consortium, which has information on 26 million consumers.
  
  This proprietary data can be "overlaid" with public data from state agencies such as the Office of National Statistics to provide a socio-economic profile of postal codes and even individual streets.

Biometrics
Biometrics uses automated methods in order to recognise one or more unique aspect of an individual derived from a physical or behavioural trait.

Fingerprinting is best known example of biometrics, but iris scans, facial topography and hand-scans are also used on different passports and ID card systems.

• The national database used by police in this country contains some six million sets of fingerprints.
• The Home Office website boasts that the UK national DNA database is the largest of any country. 5.2% of the population is on the database. By the end of 2005 the database held over 3.4 million DNA profiles.

Tagging and tracking
The movements of people, vehicles and commodities can be monitored using geographical information systems (GISs).

• In the year 2004-5 631 adults and 5751 adults were tagged at home as they awaited trial, rather than being held in custody.
• The BBC reported in 2002 that law enforcement bodies had made over 400,000 requests for traffic data from mobile network operators, who can use triangulation techniques to pinpoint the location of vehicles at a given time.

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