My husband shreds any paper with our names and addresses on it, while I claim that if it takes that little to steal your identity we're all doomed: our names and addresses are on every piece of mail that enters the house. But then, the post isn't safe. Mail fraud is rife. Yet postal workers continue to handle card replacements and bank statements, and we still bung cheques and tax documents merrily into that bright red maw.

More and more, government interfaces with citizenry online, and in filling out forms for permits, licences, and passports, we're meant to pony up national insurance numbers, dates of birth, addresses, and credit card details for fees — all the while keeping an eye out for fake websites. But when an imitation is skilful, how can we tell that a site is bogus? Besides, government   databases can be hacked, and public employees have left information-laden computers behind on trains.

We still conduct our fiscal and bureaucratic lives with a trust that now seems moronic. I am repeatedly asked in the conduct of everyday business to provide often low-paid employees whose ethics I have no reason to trust a tranche of data that in the wrong hands could ruin my life. Something's got to change. Credit cards, for example, are really no longer functional (in having become too functional). Yet absent any substitute we keep using them. Rather than tighten up protocol, we invent still easier methods of spending money — like waving a mobile at a till — and thus even easier ways to steal.