No one in my neighbourhood knows much about me but the internet knows everything. Google alone probably knows more than the local chemist, librarian, accountant, postman and wine merchant combined (and they are not telling). You are what you search: Google knows things I have forgotten about myself. It has the makings of the worst kind of busybody.

So when the world’s most famously benevolent company announced last month that it was launching a free service that would monitor e-mails in order to insert advertisements matched to the content, it was as though God had endorsed the death penalty. Google had sold itself as a force for good in the universe: how could it be planning such evil in cyberspace? What right had Google to sacrifice the intimate medium of e-mail to the craven gods of commercialism?