It is amazing how these days, laws are becoming all-pervasive and tightened. Even your private car no longer affords you any privacy and liberty. Over the past three decades, digital surveillance technology, and its usage, has increased dramatically across a whole range of areas that impact upon our lives as individuals.

Advances in digital technology and science means that governments and commercial organisations have the ability to maintain a more widespread visual, physical and data-based record of every aspect of a citizen’s life. It is impossible to move, to live, to operate at any level without leaving traces, bits, seemingly meaningless fragments of personal information.

One of the latest such digital advances is the Electronic Vehicle Identification system (EVI), with which the international movement of vehicles, and by default, their owners, can be tracked. With the EVI system, the EU is endeavouring to develop an international standard, utilised by manufacturers, member state governments, and public bodies, of vehicle identification. The recommendation is to include this device within the vehicle chassis. It is acknowledged that there is an ability to link this information to the personal details of the car owner.

In the UK, they have also trialled cam speed recording systems that, as well as identifying the vehicle, and thus through the EVI system, trace the owner, it can use imaging techniques to scan the car driver and compare this information against existing database records. Using this information, they can trace the person through a series of physical identity databases.

These systems could in reality be an invasion of our privacy. Governments across Europe are using the excuse that they are necessary for anti-terrorist and money-laundering purposes, but that does not satisfactorily deal with the question of breaching human and civil rights. Governments have a constitutional duty to protect our privacy, but relying on the government these days to protect your privacy is like asking a peeping tom to install your window blinds.

There is no guarantee that, once the information is in the system, it will ever be removed. Naturally, the driving impact of this technology is that we take more care to avoid breaching regulations, but that does not excuse the use of these methods.

The next step, as rumour has it, is that they will move to include thermal imaging and X-ray. This will enable the authorities to be able to see even through car shells. Who needs the reality TV programme when it is happening right here on the streets?

The digital advancement has indeed made inroads into more and better comforts, but, at the same time, it has also caused an increasing peril to our sacred right to privacy and data protection. Big Brother is in the driving seat! It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.