From time to time, when low in spirits, I find solace in websites on “How to Disappear”. It is not an urge to deceive loved ones and insurance companies like the appalling canoe man, but merely to toy with the idea of slipping below the official radar. Imagine walking cheerfully through the world: harmless and innocent, untraceable, unlisted, unfollowed, private.

The guides make it clear how hard this is. It is not only CCTV and biometric passports that betray our whereabouts but also banking, bills, phones, cars, laptops (how ironic , just as you completed your escape, to be outed by web records showing you surfing for advice on how often to throw your prepay phone in the river). As technology moves on, not only fingerprinting but facial scanning may betray you, and if - while remembering your gloves and refraining from sneezing your DNA - you take your sunglasses off to see the cash machine screen on your secret bank account, then iris-recognition technology will get you, snap! Oh yes, we have all watched Spooks.

Well, it is a pleasantly paranoiac way to pass a depressed half-hour, and there is a thrill in switching off the mobile, taking the bus to somewhere without CCTV and paying cash for your tea. You and your innocence can spend an afternoon alone together, unseen by officialdom.

There is something fundamentally unnerving about being watched. After the fall of Ceausescu, our Romanian friends said that one of the worst things under his regime was not lousy housing, shortages or even fear of arrest but that “They knew everything, they knew where you went”. Even in an age of Twitter and texting it is good to feel that obscurity is available: provided we do no harm and pay our taxes, we can go off-radar when we want to and Jacqui Smith can never find us.

Governments, always slow to grasp psychological realities, should try to understand this need. That they do not is apparent in their mania for collecting personal data (soon to include phone, e-mail and text records) from birth onwards, and sharing it between agencies or indeed selling it. At the last count the DVLA in Swansea had scored £9 million in “admin” fees by giving vehicle owners' names and home addresses to private parking companies - ie, to any dodgy character who claims they saw your car on their yard.

Nor is information guarded efficiently: staff at the Revenue & Customs burnt 25 million child benefit records on to CDs, twice, unencrypted; three million UK learner drivers' details were lost in Iowa, and in one year 1,500 passports were lost in the post. Even if not lost, data can be handled cavalierly: a Newcastle mother reports that her “hungover, gap-year sons” were hired, without checks, by a sub-contractor two steps from government to spend long yawning days copying NHS personal medical records on to a computer, with the occasional giggle at a funny name or embarrassing ailment.

“But,” splutters government when we jib at this, “it's for your own good! We're protecting you!” The same tone of hurt ministerial outrage will be heard more and more as people come to realise exactly what is involved in the vast new “e-borders” system, currently being set up to track everybody's international travel just because a tiny minority are up to no good. A huge new database near Manchester will hold your personal travel history and mine for up to ten years. A pilot is already running on “high-risk” routes; by the end of April 100 million will be tracked, by next year all rail, air and ferry travellers; by 2014, everyone.

And what will they know? Who you are, where you live, how you paid, your phone and e-mail, where you're going, who's with you, where you plan to stay and when you'll be back. In most cases they want your intentions logged a full day in advance. We may be forced to be “EU citizens” in a hundred other ways, but there'll be no more casual booze-cruises or spontaneous hops to the Normandy gîte or Frankfurt office; not without telling Nanny.

At the extremes, by 2014 pleasure boats, fishing vessels and private planes will be included. I recognise that yachtsmen are a minority, even counting big sail-training vessels with young crews. I can see that our problems with weather and last-minute changes of crew are hobbyist stuff. But all the same, it may interest you to know that the Royal Yachting Association and others have been trying without success to get government to say how it will work, and have little hope of modifying it.

This causes consternation, what with a £5,000 fine for not notifying your movements online 24 hours early and heaven knows what penalties for accidentally being blown on to an unplanned coast, or indeed filling in the form and then chickening out and staying up Mudlump Creek with a bottle of whisky. It may seem odd to those who do not sail, but there was a pleasing sense of ancient liberty in being able to slip out of a UK anchorage at dawn and make for Dieppe or Waterford (yes, Ireland is included now).

Opposition voices have pointed out the complexity, the cost, the paucity of consultation, the extraordinary power given to the UK Border Agency by statutory instruments without parliamentary scrutiny. Given the cases of councils already using anti-terrorist powers to catch litterbugs and school admissions cheats, there is a real fear that e-borders will be used to trump up tax claims or detect petty infringements like taking your children abroad in the school term. And there is something profoundly dispiriting in the principle of us all being suspects: universal

surveillance rather than targeted concentration on known criminals and murderous creeps with terrorist ambitions.

All this began when Tony Blair was embarrassed by a question about how many failed asylum seekers were here, and when it became clear that UK immigration control is ludicrously ineffective in an enlarged, porous EU. The depressing thing is that there used to be a reasonable system for knowing who was here - exit checks on passports. These were largely abandoned in 2004 to save money.

Under e-borders, the idea is that the pendulum will swing back until they know everything about everyone. And having so much information, they will become even more confused and give your plans to some cowboy IT contractor, who will leave it on a train seat to be picked up by grateful burglars, blackmailers and gossips.

They'll write in saying this is a caricature. It's not. It's an extrapolation, based on experience.

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