Tech can rescue us from Big Brother: opinion

Any company with an Internet-connected database can be deputised for law enforcement. Facebook Inc and Alphabet Inc’s Google respond to tens of thousands of government data requests each year. — AFP

Information used to be a localised affair. Before the Internet, bank accounts were confined to physical ledgers in a filing cabinet and took so much work to copy that they rarely left the building.

IBM mainframes entered the office in the 1960s and ’70s and introduced the era of digital centralisation. It wasn’t a conscious shift as much as a convenient one. Computers were good at managing information, so we kept giving them more. Bank checks, bond coupons, and stock certificates soon disappeared in favour of electronic record keeping. Today it would be unthinkable to rely on a paper bearer instrument of significant value.