Big Brother Is Watching – De-mystifying Business Funding
No, this has nothing to do with the nation’s obsession with TV voyeurism focused on a house in Elstree, this Big Brother scenario is far closer to the story of Big Brother made famous in George Orwell’s book 1984 where a totalitarian authority monitors every aspect of the population’s lives and uses this information to strike fear and demand the control of every sole within its reach. A terrifying read but scarier still when you look at the Government’s moves in recent years towards a Big Brother style state; the introduction of surveillance cameras on street corners, discussions around an identity card for all citizens, etc. The latest and most intrusive act so far is a law which is to come into effect in March this year which will require all internet service providers (ISPs) to keep details of all of our incoming and outgoing emails for a year and to make them available to any public authority that makes a lawful request to access them.
As with all other recent Orwellian moves the Government uses the need to track terror suspects as their main justification. After all, don’t we want to live in a society free from the fear of attack from those who would destroy our way of life? A compelling argument, but before you throw open your front door and run down the street praising the protectors of the population that are our elected leaders stop and think about it. Once you give up your right to privacy for any reason whatsoever it’s gone and will be near on impossible for you to ever get back again.
So what does the future hold for our civil liberty? Well, more good things apparently. Not for us of course, but for the Big Brother mentality that is. It is believed that the Government is looking into the possibility of creating a central database to store all of our emails, texts, phone conversations and the websites we visit. That way if they need to find out anything they like about you, such as what you have been doing every moment of every day of your life, they will have access to it at the push of a button. Of course this would not detract from our freedom at all!! I ask you, do you trust politicians? Do you trust anyone else with your spam, your personal conversations, your business transactions? Silly of me to think that this could be open to abuse or that email monitoring is just the first rather large step towards a totalitarian Big Brother state! Is that a small curly tailed pink mammal with feathered appendages I see??
Even if you forget about your civil liberties for one moment and we focus on your business interactions. Would you mind any public authority having access to your contacts, your conversations, innovations, plans and those of your staff?
Whether you are launching a new business or are running an established organisation there are certain things that you will want to keep secret from Big Brother, not because they are clandestine but because they affect the way you run your business. You may have news that you wish to release to staff or customers in a controlled fashion, have information or skills that provides you with a competitive advantage, developed innovations that will determine the direction of your business, inventions that are yet to be patented, etc. and if anyone had access to this information this would put so many aspects of your business future in jeopardy.
Angels Den has been at the forefront of de-mystifying the business funding sector, but even we appreciate that there are some things that work better when conducted behind closed doors. One of them is the post-pitch business funding negotiations. The last thing anyone structuring an investment deal would want is to suspect that every aspect of their business relationship was on record somewhere.
If all of our communications and web searches were to be stored in a central repository, how long would it be before those who would use and abuse this information find a way of accessing it? I don’t know about you, but I like my privacy. If you do too, it may be time to start quoting Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, “privacy is a fundamental right” and not to give it up without damn good consideration.
Source:
UK e-mail law ‘attack on rights’
Image © AndyRob
