Almost two years after her death, my dog still gets post. After having one batch of junk mail surveys filled in her name, she gained her own small place in the data-sphere that surrounds us all. A five-year-old Kerry Blue bitch became Ms Scathach O Gadhra (gadhar, dog, geddit).
Since there are seven dog years to one human one, she was 35. Naturally, she had "not completed third-level education", worked in security (minding our house) and was single. Her interests included hill-walking and martial arts (eating any other dog that came near).
The surveys were five years ago, but a couple of times a month philatelic, slimming and shopping offers arrive for her. Fortunately the dating agency that sought her on the phone has given up.
If a dog can go so far with one batch of junk mail filled in in her name, what hope is there for the rest of us - who email, phone and shop regularly - to control what is recorded about us? This is the central question tackled by Simson Garfinkel in Database Nation - The Death of Privacy in the 21st Century. He goes further, into the way in which information about who has moved house, become ill or fallen behind in credit repayments is routinely bought and sold in the US.
Send an email. Drive around Northern Ireland. Get 1 per cent off with your supermarket "loyalty" card. In each case, you have probably made one transaction more than you bargained for.
As well as the intended task of email, drive or "bargain", you have added one more item to the vast trail of electronic information which logs our daily lives. Recording our mailing, driving and shopping habits has become routine for bodies ranging from the phone company to the government of our neighbouring island to our supermarkets.
In his book The Irish War, journalist Tony Geraghty describes how surveillance and database technology is used to turn Northern Ireland into "an open, invisible, electronic prison".
"Throughout the IRA cease-fires of 1995 and 1997-98, the British army energetically modernised its armoury of computers," he writes. "The scale and cost of this programme reflected the army's belief that it would continue to fight an intelligence war in Northern Ireland for many years ahead and that the surveillance war would increasingly become part of normal life in England.
"The object was to unify vehicle data in Vengeful [a computer linked to the vehicle licensing office] with cameras able to read vehicle number plates at many locations and link those to the personal computer data held on terrorist suspects."
Geraghty was arrested and charged under the British Official Secrets Act because of the book, although the charges were later dropped.
State and police-sponsored surveillance is part of the attack on privacy described by Garfinkel. Much of his book, however, is taken up with the way in which small pieces of information about US citizens - shopping, travel and entertainment preferences - are combined with other pieces of information to create build up an extraordinarily detailed picture of people's daily lives.
This information in turn is used to unleash a tide of junk mail, sales calls and personalised special offers at potential consumers. Or to place restrictions on their ability to get credit or health insurance.
If this erosion of privacy, of people's right to be left alone, was not bad enough in itself, there is also the question of error.
In relation to credit reports, Garfinkel writes, "Privacy activists say that more than 50 per cent of all consumer files have a significant error in them . . . what's worse, reporting agencies frequently do not correct errors when the mistakes are brought to the agencies' attention."
Behind this wholesale attack on privacy, of course, is the rise of the computer. "Today's war on privacy is intimately related to the dramatic advances in technology we've seen in recent years . . . unrestrained technology ends privacy. Video cameras observe personal moments; computers store personal facts; and communications networks make personal information widely available throughout the world."
The extra reach - both for collection and dissemination - that the Internet gives to personal information has brought to a head the concerns over privacy that have been brewing since the 1960s. Simson Garfinkel paints a depressing picture of the extent to which personal privacy has already been eroded. In a scholarly but very readable text, he outlines the multiple victories of marketing interests over consumers' privacy for the past 30 years, and shows how, again and again, errors in this information translate directly into misery for individuals.
Like the 1,400 home owners in Vermont who were listed as tax defaulters because a credit agency employee mistook normal tax bills on town records as tax liens. "We stand at the brink of an information crisis," writes Garfinkel. "Never before has so much information about so many people been collected in so many different places."
Despite the "Death of privacy" subtitle of the book, he hopes to bring about a different end. In the same way that the book Silent Spring stirred environmental consciousness in the US almost 40 years ago, he hopes that his book will help to start a consumer campaign against invasions of privacy before it is too late.
fomarcaigh@irish-times.ie
Database Nation, by Simson Garfinkel, is published by O'Reilly & Associates, £15.95 sterling