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How do you feel about having your every online move watched, recorded and neatly filed away?

On the face of it, moves from companies like Phorm to monitor our browsing habits and use these to serve us more relevant advertisements on participating sites should be a good thing. In my case, it should mean I no longer get served irrelevant ads expounding the joys of Windows Vista, the tastiness of certain cuts of meat, or the safety benefits of a gas guzzling 4x4. Why? Because my browsing history would show very clearly that none of these subjects is of the least interest to me. Neither they nor any related field would ever crop up in my browsing habits, and so the chance of an advert on one of those three subjects inducing me to spend would be slim to nil.

The trouble is, this kind of information is highly valuable, and relevant adverts are seen

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as inadequate compensation for data with such extraordinary financial potential. Combine that with the fact that we're largely wary of faceless corporations and you can see why the likelihood of us voluntarily signing up for such schemes en mass is on a par with Apple shipping another beige Mac.

Yet we give away far more information than this every day without a second thought. Whenever you use a loyalty card you tell your supermarket a little bit more about yourself, which it can then use to tailor the mailouts that litter your doormat.

These mailouts can range from the benign to the potentially scary. Buy a box of own-brand aspirin, for example, and the mailout could range from a money-off voucher for Nurofen, in the hope you might choose a more expensive remedy, to information on private health plans, because its automated systems assumed that you have a heart condition and are using the aspirin to thin your blood. Take this argument to its most logical conclusion and any supermarket that also owns an insurance firm could use that information as a factor in quoting for life cover.

The clamour over surveillance of our browsing habits seems hugely hypocritical when we would gladly sell enormous quantities of shopping data for a return of less than 1% on each trip to the tills. So don't draw a line between the virtual and actual worlds; cut up your loyalty card first, and only then join the campaign for privacy online.