They really are watching you

You are right, they are watching you. I’m somewhat paranoid — who isn’t? But here’s a chilling little tale. You are on your way into the UK from Europe. You go through immigration. You get pulled aside. The official has a simple question: Why did you go to a particular Palestinian restaurant in London two weeks earlier?

Now if you are my husband, you blink a few times and say: “For lunch.” And you are so clearly not an international terrorist; I guess that’s that. They wave you on through. But how on earth did they know? How did they know that one of hundreds of thousands of people travelling inside the EU had been to a particular restaurant in London? I have three theories. (I always have a theory.)

There was a surveillance camera outside the restaurant. There are hundreds of them in central London. Can it be that a photograph taken by that camera was used to match photographs on a passport database? Is everyone going into that restaurant so scrutinised? I had no idea that biometric software was up to that kind of matching, in real life, as opposed to in American movies.

My second theory is based on the fact that my husband used a credit card. Did they access the credit-card records of everyone using a credit card there? Surely the banks don’t allow that? (Yes, I am naive.)

Perhaps it was plain old human surveillance, with a member of staff writing surnames down on his shirt sleeve. But the members of staff are all family, or so the proprietor said.

Is it just Palestinian restaurants? Is my privacy at risk depending on my tastes in ethnic food?

South Africa has no data-protection legislation yet, although it is very close to a final draft. We are basing our draft on the way the Europeans approach the law, which is to focus on a number of principles for data processing, leaving the nuts and bolts to an agency that would regulate the processing of big databases.

But if this is how privacy is respected, in one of the legal systems that does actually recognise and protect the right to privacy, we are in trouble. The limits of your rights become the technical abilities of some code writer somewhere to make processing huge amounts of information affordable. Forget minding the gap; watch out where you lunch.