Feature Article

Keeping watch

There has long been uneasiness about the degree to which we are scrutinised by the authorities, but with innovations like Google's Street View we are being urged to spy on each other. Advances in technology are not being matched by any heightening of scruples

My paternal granny used to spend hours every day in the upstairs room looking out across the street on the neighbours at the other side. There was one house in particular that she used to scrutinise closely and there was little they got up to in the way of coming and going that she was not privy to. I have no notion whether the inmates of the house had any idea whether they were being observed, and whether, as cells under observation are said to do, they subtly altered their behaviour to take account of the fact there was an interested party just opposite.

Little did I know it at the time, but my granny was ahead of the herd. We are gradually acquiring the means to monitor each other in a number of interesting ways. The latest development is Google's Street View, which offers the opportunity to examine a particular house in a particular street in the towns that the site covers. Like half the population I've been working through my address book, typing in postcodes and seeing for myself where others live. The novelty wears off in about a minute, but I got to see that one journalist of my acquaintance lives in an impossibly grand house but I didn't care for the look of one former editor's address. My own mansion-block flat did not feature in Street View; it's on the top floor.

Otherwise, my dismal curtains would be up for public scrutiny. There are inevitable complaints about privacy. "Congratulations, you have produced the perfect tool for stalkers and criminals," observed one user sarcastically.

We are still some way off getting real-time footage of a given address. But the technology available to voyeurs - a category to which anyone in possession of a computer could be said to belong - is still wide-ranging.

You can, for instance, find out from the land registry just what a neighbour paid for their house, and in contemporary Britain there is little more likely to generate envy/oneupmanship/Schadenfreude. Then - as if life weren't hard enough already for estate agents - the police have made available a crime profile for individual streets in London. We have yet to have the most explosive information of all - how much our colleagues are paid - but Harriet Harman, the Leader of the Commons, has suggested that in pursuit of gender equality precisely this information might become available in one form or another to stimulate women into asking questions about why their male counterparts are paid more than they are. If this information comes down to individual remuneration, it will be a hand grenade in a hornet's nest. Nothing, but nothing, is guaranteed to generate more mutual resentment in the workplace. A factory owner once told me that for his male employees, absolute pay didn't matter; it was simply the knowledge that they were being paid more than the other fellow.

These sites, which we look up for ourselves, come into a different category, then, from government databases. These new instruments are, rather, a way of us getting to know more and more of what doesn't concern us about other people, and to do so easily. We can be prurient without very much effort.

Is it good for us? The technology is too new to say, but I would have thought it likely that our ability to turn into a nation of curtain-twitchers like my late granny, only less openly, will fuel our envy of and curiosity about, other people. We are equipping ourselves with more sophisticated techniques to acquire knowledge without any corresponding development in our moral framework. We have all the nosiness of a more innocent generation with greater technological reach and rather fewer inhibitions.

Technology is laying all manner of secrets bare. Forget websites for a moment: take the most explosive knowledge of all - our DNA. Time was when a mother was the only person who knew for sure who was likely to be the father of her child. Now - pace the last Bridget Jones novel - anyone in possession of a swab who can get a child to open his mouth can find out precisely who the father is, for a fee. Every man who suffers from the primal uncertainty that his sex is prey to can have his fears confirmed or nullified. The implications are, I'd say, very profound indeed.

Less dramatically, the other evident trend is towards self-exposure, the invasion of your own privacy. An awful lot of us appear to be turning into human equivalents of Richard Rogers' Lloyd's building, with the inside on the outside. All is laid bare for Twitterers. I know more about the late Jade Goody, the recently deceased reality-television star, than I do about some of my own friends. She stripped herself naked, and even without ever having looked at Big Brother, I found myself gawping at her. Voluntary exposure made her happy but for the masses with their noses pressed against the window, it has been an unparalleled opportunity for judgementalism, compassion, a sense of easy superiority. Now the prurience is being justified on the grounds that it has heightened awareness of cervical cancer.

The novelist Julie Myerson has turned her family traumas with a son addicted to skunk into useful material for her latest book. The British newspaper-reading public has been treated to first-hand accounts from Mrs Myerson, her husband and her son; you can't not know about them. That, too, was justified on the grounds of public good, of helping other parents. An age in retreat from sacramental confession with its promise of absolution has opted for an alternative confession in the public forum, though we, to whom the confession is made, are inclined as much to judge as to forgive.

My instinct is to twitch the lace curtains close, to stop ourselves wasting time on the lives of others and concentrate on our own. As the author of The Imitation of Christ observed, "Leave curious questions. Study such matters as bring thee sorrow for sin rather than amusement. If thou withdraw thyself from trifling conversation and idle goings about, as well as from novelties and gossip, thou shalt find they time sufficient and apt for good meditation." He would have known what to make of YouTube.