What are we waiting for?

I was given a birthday gift from my daughter - the book "Welcome to the monitoring society" written by Kristoffer Gunnartz in 2006 - and it gave me some more intriguing thoughts about a future (or already present) society. The book is composed of different chronicles with specific subjects, ranging from the loss of confidentiality given by anxious parents that want to take insurance for their children (they did not know that they signed a life-time access for the insurance company to get ALL information available in patient journals) to DNA national information databanks once destined to be confidential (the Swedish PKU register) that by politicians later became available to the police. What's new to me, is that the author thinks that technology itself is the clue to why monitoring becomes attractive to politicians and other interested parties (police, military, insurance companies, private care, schools and much more).

The logic is - if we have that technology now? why not use it? They make comparisons to other technology shifts in communication like trains, air planes. The debate could be resembled to another non-existing debate in the early 20's: " if we start using those fossile fuel based transport machines (trucks, cars etc.) we will encounter huge emission problems in the future. Will it take us 50 yrs from now before we realise that is wasn´t such a good idea to start collecting all information about citizens in large computer databases?