Hear hear, Sandman. My immediate reaction on reading about this was: "Thus, one misstep at a time, we become acclimatised to the Surveillance State."

We've refused, multiple times, to have (*akkh* *phht*) smart meters installed for gas and electricity. When we found recently that our water meter was broken (I'll save the balance of that saga for later), I was annoyed that the replacment was allegedly smart; then highly amused to hear that they couldn't read it remotely because it uses a Vodaphone cellphone chip, and Vodaphone don't have any masts round here.

Must go .... champagne being opened.