When I went swimming in my local pool this week, my Apple Watch tracked not only my time on each lap, but my heart rate throughout. Then I rode a Lime e-bike home, which noted my exact route, time and calories burnt — “GPS Tracked”, it declared proudly.

Apple was not the first to imagine heart sensors. In George Orwell’s 1984, the “telescreens” in the homes of party members recorded heartbeats that might reveal a plot against Big Brother. “You could not control the beating of your heart, and the telescreen was quite delicate enough to pick it up.”

Apple Watch does not feel Orwellian but many cases of data surveillance do. Equifax, the credit scoring agency, this week agreed to pay almost $800m to settle with US regulators over a 2017 hack in which the sensitive personal information of 147m customers was stolen from a database.