While consumers are sold on home shopping and games, broadcasters are busy selling their new ability to monitor people in their homes. Hear one describe the huge amounts of data he will gather:

"Changing channels, selecting certain programmes, viewing habits, browsing through interactive sites, purchasing habits, all that kind of stuff we can track. Every click, we can track. We will be recording that information."

Everything move you make, for an average of four hours a day, will go into a file with our name on it. Who gets use of that file? Large companies, government.. the highest bidder. What control do you have? None. What is it being used for? Here's how one consultant put it:

"What we're all trying to do is change or reinforce existing behaviour."

Control. That's the buzzword being used to sell interactive television. But who is getting that control? For a year David Burke, British Editor of the anti-television magazine White Dot, has been talking to broadcasters, marketers, advertisers and IT consultants about their plans for this machine - the TV set that watches you. The resulting book Spy TV is now on sale.

What you, or other members of your family, watch on TV reveals more than you think. This book describes how your "telegraphics" will be analysed to build demographic, lifestyle, market segment and, finally, psychographic profiles.

"I can tell you loads of things about Brighton," says one database analyst, "I can tell you wonderful things about the electoral roll, lifestyle data, demographic data. I can get huge amounts of information off that, okay? If only I could then start to segment those households further by their behaviours or their emotions or their personal likes and dislikes from their TV viewing, it's fantastic. It's phenomenal!"

The intimacy and sophistication of these profiles is unprecedented, made possible by the enormous amounts of data generated by viewers, a century of behavioural research and the use of neural networking software to identify patterns and find behavioural fingerprints that link viewers to people of the same psychological makeup.

What motivates you? What makes you anxious? What makes you jump? Now your TV set will know. And it can show you alone content designed to act on that information. The people who make interactive television admit their systems create experimental conditions in the home. The computers that control your TV set will show you something, check to see how you react, and then show you something different. That's not just convenient. It is a loop of stimulus, response and measurement designed like those boxes where rats hit buttons to get food or avoid electric shocks.

Your behaviour is the video game these men are playing. Here a database analyst working with one of the interactive broadcasters talks the new language of home entertainment:

"You have to create some control group testing, in effect throw people some placebos. So if we're trying to increase their spend, or increase their usage or increase their customer satisfaction scores, we'll take one group and split it down the middle and expose it to two separate batches of data presentation."

Whoever controls your interactive TV will be able to spend years of your life just trying different combinations of programming until they find out what makes you do things. And increasingly, that controller will not be human. It will be a computer running artificial intelligence software, capable of learning and adapting. "The ultimate goal," says one consultant, "is to crack human personality in real time."

And when that goal is reached, even if they just come close, how easy will it be to sell each viewer a bottle of shampoo? A government policy? A new form of government? "There is no limit to this technology," says one excited broadcaster, "The limit is only as far as the mind can imagine!"

David Burke agrees. That's how he wrote most of the book:

"Every time I thought of some new way interactive TV could work," he says, "to control viewer behaviour, I called up the companies involved and found they were already working on it. The unbelievable thing is: we are actually paying them to do this to us!"

Privacy International awarded Spy TV a "Winston" at its 1999 Big Brother Awards and now joins White Dot in calling for a boycott of interactive television until six Demands of Viewer Privacy are met. "None of them are odious," says Burke, "They're just the conditions of ownership most viewers thought they were getting anyway."

With interactive television, no one gets what they think they're paying for, except the companies and governments who decide what information it will gather and how it will be used on viewers. When interviewed, Matthew Timms of Two Way TV saw the funny side of all this:

"..somehow they feel they're sitting there," says one, "it's just them and the television - even though the reality is it's got a wire leading straight back to somebody's computer."

Ha ha ha! This "service" is destroying a concept of privacy in the home that dates back 600 years. Spy TV has been written to call off this practical joke. Ask yourself: Who is this particular "digital revolution" overthrowing? Make sure it's not you.