As part of the great cause of defending our privacy, two campaigning MPs — the Conservative David Davis and Labour’s Tom Watson — have mounted a High Court challenge to the Government’s emergency surveillance law, described by its critics as ‘the snooper’s charter’.

The human rights group Liberty, which is bringing the case on behalf of the MPs, declares: ‘People need to understand just how personal this information is that will be taken and retained and what an intimate portrait of their lives it will create’.

There is a debate to be had over how much information our security services should be allowed to access in the battle against terrorism; but it is extraordinary how little attention is given to the far greater issue of how companies, almost all based in California, are using the most personal information of internet users for their own commercial purposes — and in a way countless millions who use their services seem scarcely to comprehend.

Big Brother government is one thing: but the snoopers we should be most concerned about are those who would sell us all to the highest bidder (picture posed by model)

If you don’t think this matters, listen to the head of Apple, Tim Cook, who last week delivered a remarkably under-reported address to the Electronic Privacy Information Centre. Cook told the civil liberties group that Google and Facebook, along with other internet search and networking companies, were ‘gobbling up everything they can learn about you and trying to monetise it’.

The Apple boss went on to warn users: ‘You might like these so-called free services, but we don’t think they’re worth having your email, your search history and now even your family photos data-mined and sold off for God knows what advertising purpose. And we think that someday customers will see this for what it is.

‘We don’t think you should ever have to trade privacy for a service you think is free but actually comes at a very high cost. This is especially true now that we’re storing data about our health, our finances and our homes on our devices.’

Of course, Facebook can protest that it makes clear to its users what they are signing up to. Its sign-in condition declares: ‘By posting Member Content to any part of the website, you automatically grant to Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully-paid, worldwide license to use, copy, perform, display, reformat, translate, excerpt and distribute such information and content...’ — and it goes on for a long while after that. Which is one reason why I have never signed up.

Apple boss Tim Cook accused Google and Facebook of ‘gobbling up everything they can learn about you and trying to monetise it’

But it is not just we old stick-in-the-muds who scrutinise terms and conditions, who are the potential fish on the end of Facebook’s gargantuan global hook: it is also dangled in front of our teenage (and even younger) children who will tick that box without a moment’s thought — and certainly with less consideration than Dr Faust gave to the contract the Devil put in front of him.

If Facebook buried in its terms and conditions the word ‘soul’, it would fit in very well with the deal it offers.

I do use Google, however, and accepted as part of the deal that it would be directing advertising to me, based on tracking my searches. Many years ago, however, I was perplexed at the number of advertisements I would receive for anti-ageing creams. So I dug into the Google software on my laptop, to get to the bit where the search engine volunteers what sort of picture it has of you, ‘based on your browsing history’.

It had apparently determined that I was ‘over 60’ — not true, but a forgiveable error given my lack of interest in any music written much later than about 1930. It also stated that my browsing history indicated that I was ‘female’. I can only assume that I must have been spending rather a lot of time, back then, searching for presents for my wife.

Actually, I had been pleased at the Google algorithms’ misconstruction of the true nature of my identity: but, as I say, this was a long while ago and technology has moved on rapidly.

An article published anonymously last week on the website Medium paints an altogether more terrifying account of the way our identities have been penetrated and put to use.

The author, who had been a computer expert in the field of ‘database mining’, left in disgust at what he was being asked to do, before returning because he retained a fascination at what he could achieve and knew that he was good at it — in particular by using ‘browser cookies’, the electronic tags internet firms attach to our identities.

It is extraordinary how little attention is given to the issue of how companies are using the most personal information of internet users for their own commercial purposes (picture posed by model)

So, he warns the reader, based on this simple electronic tracking method: ‘I could build a dossier on you. You would have a unique identifier. Even when you changed your ID or your name, I would still have you, based on traces and behaviours that remained the same — the same computer, the same writing style, something would give it away and I could relink you.

‘Anonymous data is shockingly easy to de-anonymise. Correlating with other databases, credit card information (which has been on sale for decades, by the way), public record, voter information, a thousand little databases you never knew you were in, I could create a picture of your life so complete I would know you better than your family does, or perhaps even than you knew yourself. I could understand you like no lover ever did and you would never know I was there.

‘While I could pull you individually out of that database, the real magic is that I would never have to. I could let algorithms understand you, process you, follow you, and never have to know you myself. You would be tracked and described by a thousand little bots [automated computer programs] you could never see.’

And, as the author went on to point out, firms would use this information to sell you products which you might never have thought of, by ‘nudging you ... again and again and again’.

The firms involved in this advertising nirvana will point out that they are making suggestions you are free to decline ... just as those charities did in the case of Olive Cooke, the 92-year-old Bristol woman who threw herself to her death in Avon Gorge having been driven demented by the constant wave of requests from organisations which had acquired her details by purchasing databases she almost certainly never knew about.

Big Brother government is one thing: but the snoopers we should be most concerned about are those who would sell us all to the highest bidder.

Multi-millionaire ‘anti-austerity’ campaigner Charlotte Church announced she would happily pay up if the top rate of tax were raised to 70 per cent

Can't Church stop preaching?

The multi-millionaire ‘anti-austerity’ campaigner Charlotte Church has announced she would happily pay up if the top rate of tax were raised to 70 per cent: ‘That would be totally fine for better infrastructure and public services.’

Unfortunately for the Welsh singer, there is no prospect of the present government meeting her demand.

On the other hand, there is nothing to prevent her from writing a much larger cheque than she currently does to HM Revenue and Customs. The taxman has never been known to reject donations.

Funnily enough, during the last Conservative-led government, Church seemed less keen on coughing up even at the standard higher rate. She told a BBC studio audience: ‘Why should I pay 40 per cent to a government who I don’t support?’

Sorry, Charlotte: you don’t get to decide which government you favour with your taxes and which you would rather not.

Then there is the matter of the mansion tax, which wealthy people who support Labour were presumably happy to pay. Though it is no longer on the cards, there is nothing to stop people who feel they should have paid it from donating an equivalent amount to their local NHS hospital.

Perhaps Church should put her money where her beautiful voice is.

Anna Soubry, the brassy Small Business minister, has taken offence at a rebuke made on the floor of the Commons by Alex Salmond.

After a certain amount of hectoring on her part, the former Scottish First Minister remarked: ‘She should be setting an example to new members, not cavorting about like some demented junior minister. Behave yourself, woman.’

This apparently upset Soubry, who later tweeted that Salmond ‘seems to think women should be seen not heard. His attitude belongs firmly in the 19th century’.

Soubry, lest we forget, chose a Sunday morning television programme to declare that Nigel Farage ‘looks like somebody has put their finger up his bottom and he really rather likes it’.