Tech billionaires making friends with Big Brother

There are no atheists in foxholes, and no tech regulators in a coronavirus lockdown. What was once thunderously de­s­cr­ibed as “surveillance capitalism” is now a pandemic necessity. Twitch is where our children go to school; Twitter where epidemiological models are debated; and WhatsApp where we have drinks with friends. Some 40 per cent of the world’s population is living under lockdown, according to AFP, creating exactly the kind of bored and isolated citizens whose fingers linger over their Facebook app button, as my colleague Alex Webb notes. Our personal information is hoovered up as before, but data privacy is now