When the internet age dawned, utopian marketers promised "a world without borders". People imagined shopping on the rue du Faubourg-St-Honoré from the comfort of a Jamaican beach resort. But no border has disappeared with such speed as the one between public and private. The opening up of economies and societies has given government and business powerful incentives to snoop in areas that were once inviolable. No data are safe and no institution is immune. Even the Vatican has banned mobile phones from its conclave next week, fearing they could be used for eavesdropping.

Recent intrusions into online commercial databases have shown how easy personal information is to gather, and how hard it is to guard from thieves. Intimate biographical details are the main way identities are verified in many walks of economic life. They lubricate the modern credit economy; they permit same-day mortgage approvals and anonymous internet transactions. Such data, it turns out, can be stolen and sold for profit. On Wednesday, the US Senate judiciary committee met to discuss two crises: the personal data of 310,000 citizens had been compromised in a series of "breaches" at Seisint, the data information group that is part of LexisNexis; and thieves obtained 145,000 profiles through bogus accounts with ChoicePoint, the data broker. On Thursday, news accounts revealed that Polo Ralph Lauren had followed data-storage procedures that could put MasterCard-holders at risk of fraud, although there has been no indication of security breaches. The US Federal Trade Commission says "identity theft" affects 4.6 per cent of the population each year, at an annual cost of $50bn. Perhaps Joseph Schumpeter's warning that "the capitalist process destroys its own institutional framework" is as true in cyberspace as it is anywhere else.