Back in 2008, when I fought a by-election on civil liberties issues, many thought that my focus on privacy was old-fashioned, even eccentric.

This was, after all, the era of the internet and burgeoning social media. The younger generation happily shared their lives online, handing over personal, often intensely private data with a cavalier insouciance. Within a couple of years Mark Zuckerberg implied that privacy was dead, and it looked as if he might be right.

Yet in that same year Google’s Street View cars were caught collecting wifi data from the homes and businesses along their routes. More recently it was discovered that Google’s Android operating system was tracking users’ locations without their permission or control, and there have been numerous claims that Google