Many of us have no idea how we are progressively being surrounded by surveillance cameras.

The thin wedge of the fact emerges whenever a serious crime is committed and the investigators pore over the nearby cameras in an attempt to identify the culprit/s.

It was said, but the story maybe is apocryphal, that when the new lights were set on buildings in Republic Street, surveillance cameras were also installed.

One must also add the large number of CCTVs, entry phones, etc. All these are focused on the people in the street. Maybe, given this is Malta, many of such apparata are ill-maintained and prove to be worthless when they are most needed.

But today surveillance apparata are getting more and more sophisticated. According to The Financial Times, thanks to huge advances in artificial intelligence, facial recognition software has reached a level of sophistication that many simply have no idea about. A 2010 test by a US agency found that a single person could be identified from a database of 1.0 million mugshots with 92 per cent accuracy.

To this one must add the localizing powers by means of which a mobile phone, even if shut down, can be located with a degree of accuracy.

Few of the 2.5 billion people who are online have any idea what information about them is being collected or how it is being used.

People are so careless about their own details, forget what they wrote in moments of emotion, or how such details can be collated and cross-referenced.

Today’s technology has now entered a new dimension – that of apps. More than 17 billion mobile apps have been downloaded from Apple’s online store in the year to September, as many as the store’s first three years combined, yet despite various blanket disclosures, users still do not know exactly what personal details are being sucked out by these apps from their smartphones.

Obviously, the intrusiveness is even more personal in a small society such as ours where everyone knows everyone and what would be secrets lost in the anonymity of crowds in bigger societies here may relate to persons in your own family.

The Financial Times suggested four basic rights that need to be given urgent priority.

The first is the right to know. Vague privacy policies which give little idea how the whole things works in practice are not enough. The Federal Trade Commission’s recent launch of an investigation into the leading data brokers in the US is a welcome sign that regulators are realizing greater transparency is needed.

The second right is to remain unknown. German regulators have rightly taken Facebook to task over its refusal to let its members appear under pseudonyms. Besides, online tracking of individuals ought to be banned unless expressly accepted.

The third right is to be able to change digital information in the hands of a third party that is inaccurate or harmful or to have it deleted altogether.

The final right is to be admitted as a full participant in the data economy, not simply an unwitting subject. This means that digital citizens should be freer to export their personal data to new internet services.

In George Orwell’s 1984, the inhabitants, never sure they were being actively monitored, were forced to live in the assumption that every sound they made was overheard and every movement scrutinized.

We are not so far away from that today.