Catching up on Bloglines, I came across this post by Alec Saunders about proposed surveillance cameras in Ottawa. It evoked a strange kind of cultural dissonance: virtually every town in Britain is already a panopticon. And most people don’t think twice about the roving, all seeing eyes (there are two within sight of Calico Jack’s Dundee office). Should they? While CCTV undoubtedly does contribute to the detection and deterrence of crime, there are broader questions about how we came to this and where we are going now. Is the loss of civil liberties that surveillance cameras represent an inevitable consequence of both failures to address social fragmentation and to provide proper policing? And, if the battle against surveillance cameras is lost - sorry, Alec, I think it is - where is the current front-line in the defence of privacy?

One reason that people can live with surveillance cameras, is the assumption of anonymity provided by being unremarkable in an ocean of data. We make similar assumptions about email, phone calls, IM and IRC (Internet Relay Chat) - a group communication technology that I have always thought to be under-exploited. But now read Roi Carthy’s Techcrunch post on IRSeek, an Israeli startup that indexes IRC channels. It’s worth taking time to read Roi’s post and the IRSeek blog along with the many comments. Maybe we’re not so hard to spot in the big ocean? I don’t think that IRSeek are doing anything fundamentally wrong. In fact they have triggered an important debate, the resolution of which will assist companies such as Iotum (Alec’s company) and Calico Jack . As individuals we need to get serious about controlling use of our data and assert ownership rights. Can we blame Facebook for being cavalier with our data if we don’t treat it seriously ourselves?

Scott McNealy once said: “you have no privacy, get over it”. Although the remark was seized on as a gaff, in context it is probably a pragmatic reflection on our current situation.