Facebook knows how often I text my wife and get a curry - it's creepy and Orwellian - iNews

In George Orwell's dystopian novel, 1984, the hero Winston Smith muses privately about the danger of letting his thoughts wander within range of a "telescreen" through which Big Brother monitors the citizens of Airstrip One. "The smallest thing could give you away," Smith thinks to himself as he works silently in front of one of the screens. "A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself – anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide." Orwell even invented a word for the offence that would be committed by Smith if he was to be caught in the act of wearing an improper expression. While the Facebook and Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal has revealed what is claimed to have been a deeply shocking bid to penetrate the thoughts and expressions of real people, the story still perhaps feels strangely remote to the majority of the UK's social media users.