Working with QR codes and other forms of tagging that are ultimately reliant on databases, I am acutely aware that the tools I am investigating for use in my art practice, can just as easily be adapted for data-mining, tracking people’s movements and infringement of privacy. QR-codes are already being used in Japan on the 90 day entry visas. I got one last December. On one level I feel uncomfortable about this, but on another level, I know that such systems are, for the moment at least reliant on people who can make errors, have poor communication skills or even be downright incompetant.

They keep saying in the media that Britain has the most cctv’s per head of population, that we are captured going about our daily life 300 times a day, and that 1984 is our reality… Or at least that is what they want you to believe, yet the system is faulty.

So if I am watched so often and all my movements traced by camera and database, then with the freedom of information act you would think that when I need to access that information it would be there. Truth is it isn’t. The whole system is smoke and mirrors – and the databases are nigh on useless. The only thing that makes them work is our fear that they actually  DO work. We are being “kept good” by the notion that Big Brother is  really Watching when in actual fact Big Brother is a dumb bully who makes a hell of a lot of human errors.

The NHS, the Home Office and Inland Revenue all have proven this to me, which you can read about by following their links in this sentence.  For each of them, there have been situations where I have relied on my belief in  their databases to set things straight, and they have failed. Not only  because  some of the people working them put two and two together, but also because the databases are actually very rudimentary. Although this has put me through some great annoyance and frustration, I am glad that our imaginings are still worse than the reality. As long as we have a large population and under resourced government departments relying on juniors to lose whole CD’s of unencrypted personal information, Big Brother in his true sense is still a long way off.