The Wiki Man

25 April 2009

A fortnightly column on technology and the web

This being Britain, however, the most likely outcome will be some kind of hysteria. And, by a cruel irony, the very journalists who write the scare stories about online privacy may find themselves the first casualty of the clampdown. Then, with the demise of investigative news journalism, civil liberties campaigners may experience something worse than a world where the public has too little privacy — a world where the government has too much.

The attitude to privacy varies enormously from one country to another. Germans are typically near-paranoid, many refusing to complete their census forms; in Finland, by contrast, you can go to a government website and learn your friends’ annual salaries, since they are a matter of public record. I don’t know where I sit between these two extremes, but if the cost of exposing police thuggery and MPs’ greed is for newspaper websites to know that I sometimes buy straw hats online, it’s a price I’m willing to pay.

*Sir Joseph Bazalgette is commemorated with a statue near Hungerford Bridge; his counterpart in Paris was less fortunate. The great Eugène Poubelle achieved an unfortunate immortality by finding his surname adopted as the French word for a dustbin. Later poubelle gave rise to pourriel, by combination with courriel (meaning email); in French un pourriel is sometimes used to describe what we call spam.