2 days ago
JOHN MACLEOD: He's watching! My unsettling brush with Big Brother while buying sausage and onions in the local Tesco
The other day I noticed a mildly alarming development at our local Tesco.
What had hitherto been a tiny, monochrome LED screen itemising each of my purchases, in cigarette-packet print, as the till-chick scanned everything through was suddenly as big as a copy of Cosmopolitan.
In vivid Technicolor. With an image of every item and in very big print.
I glanced right and left. It was the same at every other till. Each customer's shopping blaringly detailed for all to see.
Today, mercifully, it was just sausages, onions, fresh thyme, and a bag of fresh chicken stock.
But what if the screen had been regaling every adjacent passer-by with an itemised haul of, um, intimacies?
It's bad enough when it's a bottle of Jamesons and some Williams Bros craft-ale. You can just imagine some onlooker's thought-bubble. 'Well, there goes Johnny Journo. Dylan Thomas: The Final Days.'
But what of the day, decades hence, when my basket might include the products of deliverance from, as the commercials exquisitely put it, mild bladder weakness?
As they say, every little helps. It is even worse at the self-checkouts. These I try to avoid. For one, I genuinely enjoy the brief social interaction with the lads and lasses manning real ones.
For another, every different retail chain seems to use different machines and I can never remember on which side I may safely deposit my basket and on which as much as a fat carrot at once invokes the whine of 'Unauthorised item in the bagging area.'
There is also an inordinately long list of items which cannot be sold to minors – stuff you probably would not think of: matches, kitchen-knives, bleach, glue and razorblades among them.
So, again, the machine purses its digital lips, and there you are stuck till the harried attendant drifts over to confirm you are a verifiable old ruin, swipe his magic card and have a swift nosy at your messages.
And worse – much worse – is to come. Across Britain, supermarkets are already rolling out artificial intelligence and autorecognition technology. In England and Wales, they can even hook up their facial-recognition cameras with police databases.
VAR – the same technology that has already made football so farcical – is being deployed too. The selfsame tech that catches Erling Haaland's muscular behind offside now lurks, like a beast waiting to spring, lest you amble out of Asda with a can of sweetcorn you haven't paid for.
Tesco, too, now trials such kit – though not, so far, in the Outer Hebrides. A wee bird's-eye camera will hang over each self-checkout, watching your every move.
Should that Jolly Green Giant can not properly be scanned, it'll immediately play you a finger-wagging video – and, no doubt, in extremis, alert the hovering security-dude the size of a small house.
Even a decade ago, most Brits would have balked at this sort of thing. In the Nineties, it would have been unthinkable. 'Some of this will make your life easier,' muses one observer.
'Some of it already does. But much of it asks for something in return: your data, your privacy, your patience, your trust. And not everything you're being asked to give is visible.
'This is not science fiction. It's not the future. It's your local Tesco.'
Driving all this, of course, is the issue of what the trade calls 'shrinkage,' we call shoplifting and what our grannies called stealing.
Annually, it costs British retailers billions. There were 516,971 offences recorded in 2024 – a signal leap from the 429,873 thefts logged the year before.
But only one in five instances saw anybody charged: in more than half, no suspect could even be identified. Hence all this baleful new technology. The unsettling sense of being coldly studied by a machine.
Watched, flagged, corrected and accused. That, actually, your caring sharing Co-op fundamentally distrusts you.
Around 1990 that moral watchdog of the nation, the Free Church Presbytery of Lewis – unnerved by what had become a hedonistic and at times predatory Stornoway nightlife – called for closed-circuit television cameras to be dotted through the town.
People stared, the tabloids tittered and the West Highland Free Press ran a very funny cartoon. No one could imagine anything as outlandish. Yet we have now had CCTV in the island capital for decades. From the Manor roundabout to outside An Lanntair, Big Brother is watching you.
We are already well on the way to being one of the most surveilled societies in Europe. Even our most casual online browsing is eagerly monitored by all sorts of bots.
When, fancying a new piece of kitchen kit, I casually Googled slow-cookers, for days on end thereafter adverts for said crockpots stalked me at every online turn. Retailers I had never heard of even sent me emails.
Not everyone will tolerate this. The Germans will not stand for CCTV and, save where it is genuinely vital for public safety – like airports – you will see no cameras anywhere.
That reflects not just dark folk-memory of the Nazis, but the decades much of the country then endured under a Communist dictatorship – a society so bleak, so grey and so stifling that, as President Kennedy cracked, 'We do not need to build a wall to keep our people in.'
From secret policemen, regular informers and the occasional grass, it's reckoned that one in 6.5 East Germans worked for the Stasi. In Tirana, the Albanian capital, under the long night that was Enver Hoxha's Communist regime, the state could rely on one in three.
Indeed, I am old enough to remember when much of rural Lewis, into the present century, felt like something very similar.
People kept binoculars by their main window. Wizened crones knew every car and every numberplate. Murmured if you skipped church; found an excuse to drop by if you received a mysterious visitor or if Donny the Post had dropped off a strange parcel.
Boys and girls courted, of necessity, in the hours of darkness: ministers did not dare step out of the manse, of a Saturday, lest there be talk of their casual disregard for sermon preparation.
It sounds hilarious, but it was to some degree genuinely oppressive and why, for so many young islanders, getting on meant getting out.
My mother still remembers an occasion in 1988 when, home on holiday, she joined my father, a senior clergyman, on a spin to the village where he had been born.
He was casually dressed, they told no one where they were going, the latest family car had never been on the island before and they did not stop until they reached his uncle's croft.
And they were not ten minutes in the house when the phone rang. It was a couple several townships away whom my father had signally helped when, months earlier, their son had died in tragic circumstances in Edinburgh.
The Reverend Professor must now call on them, he must put up a word of prayer with them, and he must do it now.
So much for that day of holiday. 'And you know what?' my mother still cackles darkly. 'After all that, they joined the Free Church Continuing.'
