If you look around you, everywhere you go there are surveillance cameras – our cities, our streets, our shops, our cafes, our bars, our nightclubs, our workplaces, our parks but how much good do they actually do?   How many people are actually caught and convicted by this rash of cameras – all you have to do is wear a hoodie and you won’t be identified.

Then, of course, our emails, our data, our bank details and other personal information is also continually under attack as people try and steal our identities and empty our bank accounts.  It wasn’t like this in the good old days of passbooks and cheque books.  OK, I hear you say, what is a cheque?

The secret world of data, spies and code-breaking from the trenches of the 1st World War to Bletchley Park and the Enigma Machine in the 2nd World War and then on to GCHQ and a doll (My Friend Kayla) that was banned in 2017 in Germany for collecting too much information as an ‘illegal surveillance device’ are all here in the Science Museum’s exhibition on Big Data and Top Security.

Now of course we have Facebook, Alexa, Google and a host of other organisations harvesting and storing our data with suggestions of sinister foreign interference in elections here and in the US.  What can we believe any more?