IN George Orwell’s vision of a dystopian future, Nineteen Eighty-Four, the people of Airstrip One are watched over by a malevolent Big Brother.

In spite of anything said by this Island’s most enthusiastic conspiracy theorists, there is no Jersey Big Brother, but we are all now subject to a level of surveillance undreamt of even in Orwell’s fertile but dark imagination.

We can say that if yesterday was the era of the closed-circuit television camera, today is the era of Google Street View, technology which enables a computer user to zoom in on and navigate through a virtual world created from photographs taken road by road and street by street.

One of Google’s camera vehicles is currently doing the rounds of Island thoroughfares, snapping scenes which will soon be added to the Street View database.

Aside from wondering how long it will be before Google operatives come knocking on people’s doors to request access to the back bedroom for an even more intrusive version of Google Earth’s fly-through facility, many Islanders will feel uneasy about the present photographic mission. In other parts of the world which have already been ‘Street Viewed’ there have been complaints from individuals who see the entire exercise as an unwarranted invasion of privacy.

Although it can be argued that Google’s vehicles see no more than an ordinary person walking down a street, photographs have a permanence unavailable to images captured by the Mark One Eyeball. Also, Google’s visuals are broadcast all around the globe.

These salient facts have been highlighted by people who have been captured by Google in compromising situations – such as entering a massage parlour or walking hand in hand with someone other than their spouse.

It is unlikely – though not impossible – that objections to Street View in this small community will stop this particular wave of technology crashing onto our shores. Quite rightly, however, Data Protection commissioner Emma Martins has raised concerns about Google’s activities.

Even if no law is being broken, it is disturbing that the Street View vehicle seems to have arrived here to take its pictures without contact with any of our authorities. There is a degree of high-handedness in this that speaks volumes about Google’s international muscle but does not sit well in a community where old-fashioned values such as courtesy and respect for others’ private lives still hold sway.