Every minute, over 200 million emails are sent, 7,000 purchases take place on Amazon and 4 million google searches are made, all leaving digital fingerprints. Add to that the trail left by cell phones, credit cards, security cameras and the growing ‘internet of things’ and an incredible amount of detail about our personal life can now be inferred by computers. But with more and more decisions taken by algorithms, is there a risk we might fall into a “technocracy”?