Those of a certain age may remember a television programme called It's A Knockout, in which teams representing their home towns competed against each other in comically outlandish games.
Typically, a milkman from Bradford dressed as a chef would attempt to run along a greased slope to deliver pizzas to his cartoon oven, while attached to a bungee cord that threatened to pull him back to a watery fate.
Today, personal privacy is on that slippery slope and unlike the super-fit milkman of yesteryear, the nation has become rather overweight, myopic and totally unaware of the fate that it will inevitably endure. Things are not funny any more; in fact, everything is getting rather serious.
In my previous letter on this subject (Private life drama - leave me out, letters.computing.co.uk), I attempted to highlight that combining all the various databases that contain our personal information could lead to a situation where criminal investigation is reduced to a data-mining exercise.
Safeguards on the use of personal information need to be put in place, or a fully-fledged Big Brother-style police state will be the inevitable outcome.
Your computerised personal information is just too tempting for criminals to ignore, not to mention post-9/11 governments.
Determining how different pieces of information held on separate databases should be allowed to be combined, cross-referenced and analysed is not going to be an easy job.
But sometimes such onerous work must be squarely shouldered, and the easy way out - ignoring it - will just not do.
We often see depicted in police dramas on TV that evidence is inadmissible unless gathered legitimately. In such dramas, the police are not allowed to pursue their hunches and go on "fishing trips" to see what they can uncover. Mining personal data in the real world should require similar sanctions, with genuinely effective protection against any such mavericks.
Unless strict controls are placed on all personal data and how it is used, it will be abused. The nation, just like the plucky milkman from Bradford, needs to get back into shape and fight its way back up that slippery slope. What lies at the bottom is too terrible to contemplate.
Concerned of Liverpool