Big Brother is still watching you and he goes by the name Facebook | John Naughton

The social media giant's offer of free internet access ensures that mobile users stay where it can keep an eye on them

The security guru Bruce Schneier once famously observed that surveillance is the business model of the internet". Like all striking generalisations it was slightly too general: it was strictly true only if by the internet" you meant the services of a certain number of giant tech companies, notably those of Facebook (including WhatsApp and Instagram), Google (including YouTube), Twitter and Amazon.

The trouble is (and this is what gave Schneier's aphorism its force) that for a large chunk of networked humanity, especially inhabitants of poorer countries, these walled gardens are indeed what people regard as the internet". And that's no accident. Although Chinese smartphones are pretty cheap everywhere, mobile data tends to be prohibitively expensive in poor countries. So the deal offered by western tech companies is that data charges are low or zero if you access the internet via their apps, but expensive if you venture outside their walled gardens.