Forty years ago, I reported on how a Yorkshire village with no television signal was getting cable TV. Some locals had never seen television, but one 94-year-old man told me he did not want a cable going into his cottage. “If they can pump stuff into my house,” he said, “they can pump stuff out and pry on me.”

He seemed a Luddite then, but could be seen as a wise future gazer now that much of the world’s population has such a cable — and is realising it has downsides not unlike the one my nonagenarian feared.

Concerns about internet security have gone from simmer to boil this year. Even Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the world wide web, voiced his bitter disappointment this month. “We have lost the feeling of individual empowerment and to a certain extent, also, I think the optimism has cracked,” he said at the Web Summit in Lisbon.