I'm not a PIN number, I'm a free man (aren't I?)

Amazon keep trying to sell me CDs. Yesterday it was a new version of the last Gorillaz album. It’s got extra tracks and costs £15.

Amazon bombard me with e-mail offers because their computer tracks my previous purchases and decides I’m the sort of mug who wants to pay over the odds for an old album.

It’s one example of how clever-clever computers use all the data they collect every day.

In our surveillance society, where your’re photographed 300 times a day without your knowledge, every step you take, every move you make, they’ll be watching you.

The other day I got an e-mail from Experian, a financial data collecting company, which noticed I once thought about signing up to check my credit report.

I decided not to because I didn’t want to support an organisation which intrudes into my personal finances so much it knows exactly what I buy and when – even though I know they are can get it very wrong and blight someone’s creditworthiness.

Merely starting to fill out an application on line is apparently enough for them to get their claws into me and send an unsolicited e-mail six months later.

Then there’s the vast stockpile of information held by internet search engines like Google, which record every web-site we ever visit.

What do they want with this information? Who are they going to sell it to and what harm can it do us?

This is Big Brother. It’s sinister enough when it’s a CD shop. It’s a lot worse when it’s one of the many tentacles of the State.

We’re told that if we have nothing to hide we have nothing to fear. But why should we be banned from leaving home without carrying an identity card?

Why should we tolerate a new law allowing the police to stop any of us and demand to know who we are, what we’re doing and where we’re going?

Why should we endure councils electronically spying on our dustbins to check what we’re throwing away and fine us if we chuck empty Coke cans in with last week’s newspapers?

I don’t see why we should put up with a satellite tracking device in every car, bleeping out our every twist and turn so “they” can charge us £1.30 a mile to drive to work.

If that’s the only way congestion charging will work then forget it – the price is too high. The price is the loss of our liberty.

I object to the 4.2 million CCTV cameras recording what goes on in every High Street.

And as for those abominable “safety partnership” speed cameras, we all know they’re nothing but a random tax on unwary motorists.

Suppose the vast National Heath Service database – if it ever gets finished – wrongly notes you have some unmentionable disease and your spouse discovers this.

A friend of mine was victim of such a database when he was required to take an AIDS test before he could receive any life insurance. His girl-friend was furious.

Suppose the national DNA database identifies you as the murderer just because you are the one-in-a-trillion victim of mistaken identity. Or someone gets you put on the sex offenders’ register as a joke.

All these things will happen sooner or later. Why must we live like this? It’s not as if all these intrusions offer real benefits.

CCTV doesn’t deter thugs – violent crime is on the rise. It doesn’t even help with detection because the images are usually too grainy and indistinct to see who did what to whom.

CCTV is a substitute for bobbies on the beat. It’s difficult to know what they’re doing instead but they’re nowhere around when you need one.

When they are involved in surveillance they don’t get it right – they tracked Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes for some time before shooting him dead as a terrorist. Pity they got the wrong man.

What about identity cards? Apart from being a new poll tax – we will be forced by law to carry one and pay about £300 for the privilege – it won’t prevent a single terrorist incident.

The 2004 Madrid train bombings which killed 191 people were carried out by terrorists who all had ID cards. That didn’t protect a single life.

ID cards belong to a police state. I don’t want to live in such a place and, anyway, the people who need the policing will have already worked out how to forge them.

Meanwhile the innocent have much to fear, Never under-estimate the sheer incompetence of data collectors.

No computer system yet sold has ever done what it said on the tin. And it never will.

Instead it will reveal your innermost secrets, your darkest thoughts and your most private, personal plans to the wrong person at the wrong time and blight your life for ever.

Even if it doesn’t, I don’t want to be watched 24 hours a day. Like Patrick McGoohan in the old TV series “The Prisoner”, I want to scream: “I am not a number, I’m a free man.”

This is 2007 not 1984. Isn’t it?