Our representative government recently passed its so-called snooping law, allowing government agencies to trawl through your garbage and listen to your phone calls to find out if you’re saying anything more subversive than you think Donald doesn’t look good in a yellow bow-tie. While we’re right to be concerned about the government probing our affairs, our esteemed civil servants are just leaving the starting blocks when the rest of the field has already disappeared into the distance. Thousands of companies are probing our daily lives compiling data on who we are, what we do, how we spend our time and money. While many of these probes could be considered harmless in that their main objective is to try to work out how to sell you something, many are not. These databases of our private information are valuable to marketers, and we often fail to notice that the skimmed-over terms and conditions to which we agree may allow companies to sell our data to whoever they like. Do you really want someone to know everything you eat, wear, buy, read, see? Well, too late, they already do, and because in Hong Kong we blindly give out our ID card number to all and sundry, our actions can be directly tracked. With access to various databases your whole life is an open book: what you had for breakfast (shopping receipts); where you travelled (Octopus); what you bought/ate (credit/debit card); what you watched (cable/now channel tracking); who you talked to (phone records); what you surfed (search records/isp tracking)... Using that information you are profiled and grouped – maybe as a subversive threat to Hong Kong because you went to the June 4 memorial; maybe as a person likely to queue up for five hours to buy the latest McDonalds happy meal gift... No longer are you anonymous; you are a profile and you should be worried about the assumptions being made about you.

According to the basic law, the only two groups of people entitled to ask for your ID card are the police and the immigration department. Yet try opening a bank account, getting a mobile account… in fact, much of daily life here is practically impossible without having to offer up your ID card number at some point. If you don’t want to? Well, basically you’re flat out of luck. Okay, there may be valid reasons for some companies wanting to make sure you are who you say you are before they empty your bank account. But how securely are they protecting your personal data? Credit card data, internet search details are regularly being dumped into the public domain and that's just the companies who are caught. Identity theft is not a big issue in Hong Kong at present, but in the US and Europe it’s a growing problem. And it’s much easier for the criminals to impersonate you – Hong Kong ID cards being available just over the border for a few dollars – than it is for you to prove you are you, and get their actions undone and your credit record/bank account restored. So worry less about the government, and be concerned about your identity and what other people are doing with your personal data. Unless you’re the Matrix’s Mr Smith, not being you can be an expensive problem.