Am I the only one who doesn’t actually mind CCTV?

We long ago sacrificed our privacy on the altar of technology

It’s not easy to say the words “an invasion of my privacy” these days without a derisive nasal whine. At some point, a legitimate defence of one of the most sacred aspects of life segued into the go-to virtue-signalling lament for everyone from petty thieves to rapists and murderers – when they’re not getting querulous about their gender pronouns, that is. If you have something to hide, privacy becomes tremendously important. And if you don’t, you might still fancy striking a blow for liberty and turn yourself into a human rights hero.

Ed Bridges is that hero. Thanks to the father-of-two from South Wales, who has brought a landmark case to the High Court, all facial recognition cameras across the country could soon be banned – with CCTV conceivably following suit. The 36-year-old embarked on his campaign – with the help of Liberty, which has provided the former Lib Dem councillor with a solicitor – after an incident during a Christmas shopping trip in 2017.

Having stepped out of his office at Cardiff University that day to go window-shopping, Mr Bridges spotted a police van with a camera on top. “I didn’t think anything of it until I was close enough to read the words ‘facial recognition technology’ on the van,” he said after his lawyer decried the use of it as “sexist, racist and illegal”.

“When you are close enough to the van to read that, it will have captured your biometric face data several times over. That struck me as an invasion of my privacy.” I can only imagine how

shaken Mr Bridges must have felt and how many hours of PTSD therapy he was subsequently forced to undergo.

And, of course, his is a sentiment that would surely be backed by the (as yet still unidentified) person who murdered a man five minutes away from that very street last Sunday; one that the two men who released tear gas on a crowded London Tube train on Saturday would also vociferously uphold – along with the Israeli teens said to have gang-raped a 19-year-old Briton in Ayia Napa earlier this month.

And maybe I’m alone in vehemently not caring how many furtive photographs, handprints or footprints are taken of me as I carry out intimate tasks, like posting a letter, if it helps prevent a single future knife crime.

But the farcical element surrounding privacy bleatings invariably comes from the fact that we have never been less private – or free. Both unconsciously and consciously, we long ago sacrificed every instinct even vaguely associated with privacy on the altar of technology. From modesty and subtlety to detachment, diplomacy and plain old reticence, we simply do not give it a moment’s thought in our daily lives.

So while we instantly rise up to shut down technology when it’s a force for

good and being used to protect us, we’ll let tech giants like Google – who reached a settlement with the US last week after an investigation revealed it had been illegally tracking how minors were using its platform – behave with impunity for years.

We’ll surf the internet in coffee shops and public places, despite being warned it’s so unsafe that, as one top cyber security expert revealed at the weekend, you won’t notice a thing “until your bank account has been emptied”. We’ll ditch parenting in favour of “sharenting”: why keep that cute picture of your daughter at the school gates to yourself when you can identify her, along with where and when she can be found to every loon and sicko out there?

And we’ve been so busy tweeting and Instagramming crucial personal information for the past decade (“I’m away on holiday – in case anyone fancies breaking into my flat”) that we’ve failed to notice how viciously our young have been targeted with algorithms of evil based on all the information out there: ads encouraging everything from anorexia and self-harming to suicide. So when we gasp with horror at the latest Faceapp gizmo that shows us how we’ll look in 30 years’ time – #Agechallenge – it’s worth remembering that the real nightmare is the company’s Russian owners, and whether they are harvesting our data.

Although the High Court won’t reveal its decision over the legality of live facial recognition technology until later this year, Parliament’s science and technology committee has already warned police to stop using it. And it’s true that the one important point to be upheld in Mr Bridges’ argument concerns accuracy. Because face recognition technology is still so new, it’s far less accurate in identifying women and ethnic minorities, meaning that innocent members of those groups are more likely to be wrongly identified by police.

But, like all technology, one would hope that this can be honed, rather than thrown out entirely. Which would in effect only weaken the good guys still further, while allowing the bad to have continued free rein.