You trust the Government, you voted for them, you and your friends have nothing to hide with regards to your sexuality.

But! Shock horror! After creating the database, the Government loses the election and the homophobes at UKIP get in to power!

Now they have a database of every gay in the village, and can harass then, try to "cure" them, or make their lives a living hell.

Far fetched? Not really. With Cameron's inane web filtering plan, the "black boxes" in ISPs which can record every click you make, and the selling of the your NHS details to private parties, we're in a situation where a malicious government could cause serious damage to us.

The security expert Bruce Schneier wrote a wonderful article for CNN on how the existing surveillance state is leading to disastrous breaches of our private information. He concludes by saying:

It's bad civic hygiene to build technologies that could someday be used to facilitate a police state.

-- Bruce Schneier on CNN

We have to be careful that the apparatus we build cannot easily be misused for evil purposes. Sure, even an innocuous toaster can be weaponised if someone is willing enough, but we should not fall into the trap of making systems which can easily be turned against the people.

It's probably sensible to build a database of which car belongs to which owner - it has an important civil use and would be hard to abuse (although not impossible).

Should we have a national database of, say, religious beliefs? Almost instinctively the answer is no. The memories of fascist dictators haunt our collective consciousness. We have seen countless times how race and religious identity become death penalties. We wouldn't countenance it.

Civic hygiene isn't about saying we distrust our current government - it's about not trusting the next government.

I've always wanted to say to people "just so you know, I am also recording this call." Well, now I can.

A little back story...

Around 4 years ago, I experimented with recording phone calls. It was quite a clunky process, involving conference calling in another line.

Of course, Android has theoretically supported native call recording since its inception. However, Google have ignored all the requests to actually enable it.

Android has a number of call recording apps. On most phones, the call recording works by putting the phone on speaker mode and using the microphone to record both sides of the conversation. That has obviously disadvantages for call quality - not to mention that you don't always want to have your conversations on speakerphone!

Luckily the enterprising chaps at GrinZone have found a way round this limitations on some phones.

With InCall Recorder on my Galaxy Note II, I can finally record line quality audio on my phone calls.

Take a listen:

One of the great things about InCall Recorder is that it automatically upload the recorded MP3s up to DropBox - so your calls are instantly available to you and anyone else with whom you choose to share the folder. In the UK, it is perfectly legal for an individual to record their calls - and there is no need to inform the other party nor obtain consent. Individuals are exempt from having to comply with the data protection act. Interestingly, so are journalists...

In other countries, check your local laws :-)

Of course, it's polite to inform someone that you're recording them. More than that, for some people it really improves their attitude and their service. At the moment, I'm going through the tedious process of buying a house - I've found that with some individuals, it's very handy not only to record the call and play it back for reference, but to let the other party know that's what I'm doing.

Listening back to some of my favourite calls over the last year has been very interesting and quite emotional - I can certainly see why our security services enjoy listening in so much!

I wasn't expecting a whole CD's worth of information - like Facebook provides users - but what I did get surprised me.

Twitter UK has no control or responsibility over the user information in the Twitter service and cannot respond to these sorts of requests.

So, I was rather surprised to see Privacy International telling people to contact Twitter's UK office.

I'm not sure whether PI are mistaken, or Twitter UK are.