There's no need to get paranoid, technology is your friend. It even helps you pay your bills on time. For example, the police in Paris send out correspondence to speeding drivers. The letter merely says an automatic camera has recorded the car and those inside it, at a certain time on a certain street. Would monsieur or madame like to pay immediately, or have the picture sent to a home address for verification? For some reason, a far greater proportion of such fines than ever before are paid by return post.
It has become relatively straightforward for the authorities and private companies to accumulate vast amounts of data on ordinary people, and it is easy to see the benefits. Video cameras make our streets safer; storing the time, date and location of each credit card transaction helps the Garda i track those who would steal your money; mobile phone signals help rescue workers find stricken skiers beneath an avalanche.
But while each tiny step seems like a reasonable one, together they mean our society has moved a great distance in a short time. Now, almost every action we take is recorded and stored, by someone, somewhere.
Already, almost 30 per cent of the population has a mobile telephone. Everyone knows that each call is logged, but few realise that merely leaving the phone switched on will record which is the nearest mast. Walk from the top of Grafton Street to the bottom, and the phone acts as an electronic tag, transferring the signal from one base station to the next, logging an approximate location for the bearer.
High above the street is a closed circuit video camera, recording how you stopped to look in the window of a shop, ignored a plea from a homeless person, took a second glance at an attractive stranger.
The cab you ordered on the company account has data on where you were picked up and dropped off; rent a video tonight, and there will be a record of your taste in entertainment. Choose a pay-per-view event, and that too becomes part of your profile.
Surf the Internet and you will automatically download "cookies" to your own computer, which store information on your browsing habits and send it back to those who run websites.
Your bank and credit card firm know where and what time you had lunch or dinner, and how much you paid. Also, whether you buy a lot of expensive clothes, how often you go on holidays, and exactly what you purchased that time in Amsterdam in 1987.
The supermarket knows a great deal about you too, because you use a loyalty card. Every item you put through the checkout is recorded, along with the time of day you purchased it.
By massaging your data with powerful software, a supermarket can build a sophisticated profile of your needs and desires; how you prefer frozen pizza and beer to broccoli and spring water, the way you always choose the cheapest shampoo and the dearest camembert, how you always seem to be broke towards the end of the month.
After a couple of years, this profile can be pretty accurate; a life in shopping.
Technically, none of this routine surveillance is rocket science any more; in fact, anyone can do it. The reason it is so easy lies in two areas, the capacity to store vast quantities of data, most of which will never be used, and the ability to sift through that data at great speed.
There were lots of computers a decade ago, but back then the average hard drive held maybe 40 megabytes - enough for the text of an entire encyclopedia set - not the 5,000 megabytes of today. The speed at which the average machine can process information has also increased enormously.
This trend is sure to continue; at a conservative estimate, computers in five years' time will be five times as fast, and be able to store five times as much as they do today. In turn, this will make the gathering and processing of large amounts of data easier than it has ever been.
A technique already growing in popularity in the United States is the electronic "triangulation" of data, which takes anonymous information from a survey and by a process of elimination matches it with real names and addresses. With ever-faster computers, the numbers of those being trawled by such methods could easily encompass most of the population.
Citizens do have some protection. In this country, the Data Protection Act (1988) means that individuals can apply to see any records kept on them, and those who collect data must obtain it fairly, and for a specific purpose.
Eircell, Esat Digifone, Dunnes Stores and Tesco all stress that they never pass data on to third parties, and give it to the Gardai only if requested by a senior officer or on foot of a court order. Other companies seem similarly well-meaning.
But just five years ago, the journalist Susan O'Keeffe was arrested and charged because she would not reveal a source for a story. Today, a tribunal, court or the Director of Public Prosecutions could merely order her mobile phone records, then crosscheck this information against the mobile records of the five people it most suspected gave her the story. If they were lucky, Ms O'Keeffe would have met her source under the gaze of one of the dozens of closed circuit television cameras in Dublin.
And before we look to the European Union to protect our rights, we should be aware of "Enfopol", the latest plan from the EU Commission. In brief, it will give European law enforcement agencies - presumably including everyone from MI5 to the Greek secret service - a back door entrance to the computer systems of all mobile telephone companies and Internet service providers. The EU is also planning legislation to hinder the ability of citizens to send encrypted email to one another.
The advantages of each new technology may, of course, outweigh any of our concerns about privacy. DNA profiling at birth, for example, would mean rapists could be easily caught and jailed. Electronic ID would prevent teenagers from buying alcohol or cigarettes, and mean runaway fathers could not escape paying child support. VHI cards with embedded chips would save lives by storing our medical histories. Electronic toll booths would speed up the traffic. Video surveillance of all streets would make them safer.
And as the Information Age kicks in, other legal issues are emerging. Does an employer have the right to read an employee's email? Or listen to voicemail? Should insurance companies be allowed to offer lower premiums to motorists who agree to install a "black box" to record their driving habits?
Should health insurance companies have access to DNA records, and be allowed to stack their premium prices in favour of those with "better" genes? Could they refuse to cover someone whose parents had hereditary heart disease?
The cumulative effect of all of this on our society is likely to be great. The American educationalist, Neil Postman, argues that all technological change is ecological, not additive. In other words, each new technology changes the entire ecology forever.
So far, Postman has been right. Gutenberg, a devout Catholic, could not have imagined that his printing press would lead to Protestantism; television turned out to be slightly more than radio with pictures. An example in today's Dublin is that that the value of a taxi licence plate is being undermined by the high penetration of mobile phones. The taxi-taking classes tend not to hail cabs, with roof signs and plates, on the street any more - they dial for one on their mobiles. And whether it is a taxi (plate: £80,000) or a hackney (plate: £5,000), they could not care.
Within a decade or so, the notion of anonymity - of just being a face in the crowd - will be over. So too will the very concept of running away, re-inventing oneself in a big city or a foreign country.
The millennium-long themes of our literature and popular culture will cease to have modern resonance. There will be no more "mysterious stranger" character.
If a 21st-century Jay Gatsby were to tell Jordan that he was the son of wealthy people from the Mid-West, brought up in the United States but educated at Oxford, she could simply check out the names of graduates on the Internet.
Oscar Wilde's Jack will never again be able to tell Gwendolen his name is Earnest, and a thoroughly modern Lady Bracknell would run a simple DNA test to discover who were the two parents he lost so carelessly.
Superman's enemies could easily overcome him by bribing a hospital worker and finding out his strength-sapping allergy to kryptonite.
In the United States, there are already dozens of private companies that will trawl through publicly and privately available databases to build a dossier on anyone you like, or don't like. Just search on the Internet for "investigative services".
Some information, such as court records or property planning blueprints, has always been available. The difference is that it is now immeasurably quicker and easier to find; it can all be done online.
No incident will be too small to recede into the past. An example might be that drunken-driving conviction way back when you were 18; there is a record of it, somewhere in the vaults of the courts or even in the archives of a newspaper, but the chances are, no one will ever find it. However, your son's identical offence this year will never be more than a few taps on a keyboard away.