A relinquishment of privacy not even George Orwell imagined

Peter Marks:

"The NSA leak reminds us - even as Google, Apple and Facebook protest their innocence - that surveillance today is integrated with commerce, something Orwell did not foresee. Again, many of us now know this, and many more are complicit, happily providing personal information in order to purchase over the web or connect to cyber communities.

"Our unpaid labour makes billions of dollars for many of these companies, and our credit card purchases supply information for many others, invaluable in planning, advertising and product development. Orwell has nothing specific to say on these matters. But Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's bluff assertion that privacy is no longer a social norm might usefully be judged against Nineteen Eighty-Four, where party members have no privacy. The novel supplies a means of thinking critically about what privacy means now and how or whether it will survive in the future."

Not even George Orwell envisaged this