I think a lot hinges on whether it's compulsory or optional. Of course, even if it's optional, if everybody does it then there's social or even economic pressure to join in (the more people who have a mobile phone, the harder it is to operate without one). But to my mind the critical thing is that there should be no compulsion by the state.

This is not to do with it it being physically invasive - though that makes it more of a big deal - but part of a general reluctance to live under a constitution that tells me what I must do, as opposed to what I must not do. That's not an inviolable principal. I don't mind paying taxes, or being conscripted in wartime. But taxes one only pays if one works or buys (granted we all do that, but there is a distinction to be drawn), and conscription in war is an emergency thing.

What I don't like is that the government would require me to do something (like carrying and ID card, or registering with the local police when I move house, as I understand one has to in some other parts of Europe) just because I exist. I think the right to sink without trace is important, not because one ever really wants to exercise it, but because it's a boundary on state power.

And the reason I like this boundary to be there is really just a matter of history. If you had to look back over the last five hundred years, and pick a country to be born into at some point in that time, in a social situation chosen at random, what countries would be high on your list? High on mine would be all those countries that have a legal and cultural tradition that the government can tell you what you mustn't do, but not what you must.

They just seem to have been nice places to live, and I think that niceness resulted in part from that tradition.

Thanks for raising this interesting topic. Cd we have a link to the article?

§ George Sherston