The Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering (CASPIAN), an activist group in America, has condemned the use of supermarket loyalty cards due to their intrusion into personal lives. Yet it seems to me that loyalty cards are not very worrying. As Declan McCullagh notes, "Nobody is forcing shoppers to sign up to discount cards; they do it because the perceived benefits outweigh the perceived costs." Information surrendered typically concerns the number people in the household, the number of children, the typical weekly spend on groceries etc. I am happy for a supermarket to have this information: it helps the supermarket tell me about products I am likely to be interested in.

Rather than worrying about businesses using data in order to make their shopping experience more tailored to individual customers, we should be worrying about the number of civil servants allowed to snoop on their fellow citizens. According to the Foundation for Information Policy Research police and other officials are making around a million requests for access to data held by net and telephone companies each year. Customs and Excise have 200 staff authorised to use the snooping authority and had sought access 35000 times in the last year. The Inland Revenue accessing such data a further 11700 times in the last year. Do we allow too much snooping, or is it important for fighting crime?