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Monday 13 October 2008

Status anxiety

What bugs me is not identity fraud but who will be watchdog to BBC’s Watchdog

Toby Young has no need of a noddy shot

During my interview, Julia introduced me to a ‘cyber investigator’ — a polite, bespectacled young man — who then revealed what he’d been able to find out about me armed with the information ‘Amba’ had gleaned from my Facebook profile.

‘Is that your phone number?’ he asked, pointing to some digits on a computer printout.
‘Yes,’ I conceded, ‘but, then, I’m not ex-directory. You could have got that out of the phone book.’

‘How about that?’ he said. ‘Is that your home address?’

‘Yes, but that’s in the phone book, too.’

‘Cut,’ cried the director. ‘This isn’t working.’

For the second take, he instructed the ‘cyber investigator’ to just rattle off the things he’d been able to find out about me without giving me time to react.

‘It’s just for reasons of compression,’ he explained.

The polite young man duly complied and, when he’d concluded his ‘investigation’, Julia Bradbury asked me whether I was shocked that he’d been able to discover so much about me.

‘Not really,’ I said. ‘I mean, I have written two volumes of memoirs.’

She looked momentarily dumbfounded by this, but decided to press on.

‘Yes, but don’t you realise how vulnerable this makes you to identity theft?’

I hesitated.

‘The thing is, Julia, I actually want people to start going round impersonating me. Having people pretend to be you is a sign that you’ve arrived in our society.’

‘Cut,’ said the director. ‘I think we’ve got enough, Toby. Thanks for coming in.’

‘But what about the “noddies”?’ I asked. ‘Don’t you want to film Julia “listening” to what I’m saying so you can cut it in afterwards?’

‘No, that won’t be necessary.’

Toby Young is associate editor of The Spectator.

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