This is a current, not a future-based, scenario. We are all ‘glass consumers’: others know so much about us, they can almost see through us. Our everyday lives are recorded, analysed and monitored in innumerable ways but mostly we do not realise, or think nothing of it. When we are aware, we may even welcome it – CCTV may make us feel safer, we may appreciate discounts received as supermarket loyalty cardholders.

Yet our lives are subject to forms and levels of scrutiny that raise hugely important issues, which question the kind of society we want to live in. The significance of what has been dubbed the ‘personal information economy’ resonates across the consumer landscape, from food to finance, education to the environment.

This introduction discusses why this economy is of fundamental and growing importance: its operation increasingly will define our experience and choices as consumers, yet its impact is insufficiently understood and inadequately addressed. While debates such as those on identity cards capture extensive media coverage in the UK, the everyday, pervasive ways information use affects consumers lie largely unexplored. But it is in the back offices of public and private sector organisations, where our personal information is relentlessly processed, our worth or risk abstracted from our profiles, that our opportunities in the future will be determined. The chapter begins by sketching the personal information economy, some of the key issues it raises and the contents of each subsequent chapter. The National Consumer Council's (NCC) recommendations are to be found in the conclusion, which sets out its manifesto for change. But first, how can we begin to assess the significance of the personal information economy?