The people I've never met who know all about me
My personal data can, in an instant, be retrieved by thousands of people I've never met. But finding out what information they hold on me is considerably more difficult.
There are a few people, like Jamie, who can get me answers in seconds. A "Team 10" call centre worker at the DVLA's office, he is happy to tell me when I passed my test and, thankfully, that there is "no record of any points or endorsements at all" to my name. What he doesn't tell me is the times other firms have requested my details.
One such company is Streetcar.co.uk, a car rental service. A quick call and a woman called Lauren tells me she knows that I booked a VW van on 9.22am on December 30 and returned it at 4:30pm. I used £12.88 in fuel, Lauren says, before assuring me that - although she knows I didn't drive through the London congestion zone - she has no record of where I took the vehicle.
Someone, of course, does. A detailed itinerary of my journey - along with 10 million other drives that day - can be pieced together from all the occasions the van passed under the gaze of an automatic number plate reading (ANPR) camera, which stores the information in a data centre for up to five years. Police have been encouraged to "fully and strategically exploit" the database.
There are easier ways for the authorities to track me. State officials could request details of journeys through London recorded on Oyster cards from Transport for London, and then watch me walk under their CCTV cameras.
Easier still, they could ask Vodafone for the records it keeps of where on the planet my mobile phone has been.
Even my workplace can track my whereabouts from my security pass, which yesterday recorded that I entered the building at 10:12am and nipped to the toilets at 13:43pm.
My debit and credit cards also leave a valuable trail of my journeys. They reveal, for example, that I spent £9.24 in a Tesco in Islington, London, on Tuesday last week and, two days later, took money out of an ATM in New York.
During that trip Virgin Atlantic automatically handed the US government my PNR (passenger name and record) data, which includes my mobile phone number, email and food preferences.
To find out what records the UK government or any firm keeps on me, I'm told I need to submit a data protection request, and to wait at least 40 days. But I know state bureaucrats can find out my schooling, my outstanding student loan, my genealogy, previous addresses and all the times I visited an MP. The government wants to have a record of every email I send or phone call I make, just in case I am a terrorist, or know one.
There is information - such as my medical records - I'm glad the government keeps. For a £10 fee, my GP said he would put me in a spare room at the surgery and show me all the boxed paper files accumulated since the day I was born. In the future, under plans to computerise all patient records on a £12.7bn database, my medical history will be potentially accessible to thousands of NHS staff across the country.
But even my medical records are less personal than the piece of data I know the police have stored in a freezer somewhere. My genetic make-up has been police property since I was 17, when my loutish friends raised the suspicions of the local constabulary, who invited us all to spend a night in the cell. I was released, without charge, the following morning and seven years after that night the incident was deleted from my file.
But the DNA sample they forced me to give was not, placing me among the 7.39% of the UK's population on the National DNA Database, even if we did not commit a crime.
What I find more alarming than the data the state holds, loses, and increasingly wants to share, is the vast trove of personal information about me companies I have never heard of have stored.
Trawling through databases, I know companies like to tell me what I want to buy before I've even thought of it.
A nectar-card refusenik, I forgo loyalty cards to be certain that Tesco et al do not have a forensic record of my eating habits, mainly because it bugs me.
But when I use the internet it is virtually impossible to avoid leaving an imprint that will be thrown back at me, in the form of targeted links.
My gmail account - which has stored 2,532 emails, providing a chronological narrative of my adult life - tells me I need a "womb-like baby bed" or I need to "Learn How To Kiss A Girl In A Way That Makes Her Melt In Your Arms".
Data trawling adverts often get it wrong. But when social networking websites such as Facebook, which display unprecedented amounts of public information to the world, are involved, the data used to paint a picture of an account holder can be invaluable.
The same is true for any internet purchases. Hence iTunes knows my most embarrassing music predilections, while for some reason Amazon thinks I might want to buy The Conversation, a 1974 movie about surveillance.
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