"Privacy is dead - get over it!” So proclaimed Scott McNealy, the CEO of Sun Microsystems, in 2000. It might appear that in an age of increased surveillance, with huge amounts of personal data floating around, he has a point. But privacy is a fundamental human right and we give it up at our peril.

Privacy is essential for the proper functioning of a liberal, democratic society. The right to privacy gives people a space for intimacy, independence of action and freedom of speech. Privacy is a public good and benefits society in the same way that clean air does. It is something we would do well to protect.

The problem is that technology enables the State, companies, all of us to collect and integrate more and more personal information. Every five years this capability increases tenfold. It has put an end to “practical obscurity” - you can no longer lose yourself in the crowd.

When science and technology move at these rates, government has a duty to anticipate the consequences of this loss of privacy. So the Government must commission some “big thinking”. For instance, years before much of the fertility technology actually existed, Baroness Warnock's committee described the framework needed to grapple with challenges of advances in human fertilisation and embryology. We need a Warnock report for privacy.

Such a review cannot itself restore our faith in how government and the private sector deal with data. Being told the truth about data breaches would be a start. Our laws do not require government or companies to tell us of breaches that may lead to identity theft and fraud. My second proposal would require such a notification.

My next proposal is that all government departments controlling large databases appoint a chief privacy officer to take direct accountability for personal information. Social media companies, such as Facebook, do this routinely.

The one thing we know about databases of whatever stripe is that they contain data that is wrong. Garlik, the online identity experts, submitted 30 freedom of information (FoI) requests between September and November last year to government departments and offices. The Data Protection Act requires that an organisation must act if people tell it that the information it holds on them is inaccurate. Only three of the thirty departments contacted had written correction procedures in place. Only the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency and the Department for Transport have had independent audits to show that they comply with the Act.

So my fourth proposal: all government departments must put in place written procedures to manage, monitor and report on the accuracy of the personal information they hold.

A fifth proposal is that all government departments be subject to periodic independent audits to prove that they comply with the Data Protection Act and that they should publish the results. Nothing would help to restore faith in a battered political system more than the disclosure of a great deal of information that the Government collects but does not make available. Proposal six is routine open access to government data - the assumption should be that information on schools, health, transport and commerce, every sphere of our national life, should be freely available using the standards of the web.

This would also help to tackle the frustration of our Freedom of Information Act. It is difficult and tedious to exercise the right to information and get results back in a useful form. The process is cumbersome and too slow. Proposal seven is a requirement that all FoI requests and results also be made available in web-accessible formats. We would be in a different world now if that had applied to MPs' expenses.

We live in a surveillance culture - from automatic number plate recognition to congestion charge cameras, from the recording of the position of your mobile phone to the internet provider address of your computer. We cannot always stop this technology being deployed, but we can hold it accountable. Proposal eight would be to insist on proportionality. When Poole Council used surveillance cameras under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act - a law passed to combat serious crime and terrorism - to check if a mother actually lived in a school catchment area, the Home Office ruled it disproportionate. All such surveillance or use of data by companies and authorities should be open to this test.

While the technology gallops ahead we have not built the social conventions to manage how new forms of digital data should be used. Photographs on a social network site can ruin a person's employment prospects. A further proposal would encourage us to rule as inappropriate the use of such information by employers. Just because information is out there doesn't mean that it should be used, any more than the fact of race, age or disability can be.

The burden of making sense of our supersaturated information culture should not just be the State's or big business's. As individuals we have obligations as well as rights. Common law defines a reasonable expectation of privacy - if we all conspire to let this reasonable expectation drop, privacy withers. So it is up to us to defend this right. It is our duty to demand that information gathered by the State or corporations or other individuals does not encroach on our right to privacy.

Nigel Shadbolt is Professor of Artificial Intelligence at Southampton University

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