LONDON, England - March 19, 2008 - This column is utterly pointless. I'll say it now to save you the trouble later. It won't make a blind bit of difference to what Britain is becoming - a society in which ordinary citizens have no rights of privacy. Fifty years from now you won't be able to buy so much as a packet of condoms without producing a biometric ID card, linked to a government computer that logs (“for your own good”) how much nookie you're getting - and probably where, when, how and with whom.

But I'm going to write it anyway, because as far as I'm aware it's not yet forbidden to object to the imposition of sinister surveillance - though that will probably be only a matter of time. Besides, it's not good for my health to walk round with my blood boiling and steam coming out of my ears.

So here goes. Is it not astonishing, horrifying and, worst of all, deeply un-British that, when Heathrow Terminal 5 opens for business next week, every one of its passengers will be compulsorily fingerprinted? Yes, even if you are merely flying from London to Manchester, you will be required to place four little pinkies on an electronic pad, just as if you had been charged with robbery with violence. You will also be photographed. And that's just at check-in. When you reach the departure gate, the whole process will happen again.

Let's not even consider how much this will increase lines. Just ask yourself by what right British Airways (which has exclusive use of Terminal 5) and BAA, which runs Heathrow, can demand your fingerprints - even if they are transporting you to another British city.

And let's get one thing clear. This is very much their doing. It's nothing to do with the police, the security services or the Home Office. For once, it seems, this isn't more government meddling in our lives. We are assured of that. Indeed, BAA has issued a statement promising that all fingerprints and photographs of passengers will be “destroyed after 24 hours” and not passed to the police or anyone else. Whether you choose to believe that is up to you. My view is that the security services will find the prospect of obtaining four million sets of fingerprints each year far too mouthwatering to pass up. After all, they even want to trawl the Oyster card database now for details of Londoners' travel movements.

So what excuse do these private organizations have for demanding such intrusive personal details from us? As far as I can see, the excuse is their own embarrassing design incompetence. Most airport terminals keep domestic and international passengers separated. Terminal 5 apparently won't. So, BAA tells us, it will be theoretically possible for a foreign villain or illegal immigrant to fly in, claim to be in transit to another country and thus avoid going through passport control, swap boarding passes with an accomplice booked on a domestic flight, and alight at another UK airport without going through a border check.

Call me skeptical, but that tangled scenario strikes me as a nonsense. If the issue is simply that of incoming passengers slipping into the country unnoticed, let all foreign visitors be checked - even fingerprinted - when they step off the plane, whether they are in transit or not. After all, that's what the Americans do to us. It's not a very polite way to welcome visitors, but it's a lot more acceptable than giving private companies the right to fingerprint British citizens, especially when they are only traveling round their own country.

But in that last sentence lies the nub of the matter. We didn't grant BAA any such “right”. Nobody debated this issue. Nobody voted on it. Nobody passed a law. Probably, like me, you weren't even aware that it would happen until last week. Maybe you weren't even aware until now. Yet because of BAA's stranglehold on the major British airports, it will now be very difficult to avoid having your fingerprints taken every time you travel by air.

And this will, of course, be the thin end of the wedge. What happens next week at Terminal 5 will soon be repeated at Terminal 1, where domestic and international passengers also mingle. And what happens at Heathrow will soon happen at other British airports. There are already plans to do the same at Gatwick and Manchester.

The hassle and cost will be unimaginable. The potential for misuse of the data is horrible to contemplate. And there's no guarantee that the technology is up to the job anyway. Matching fingerprints in “real time” (i.e. the time it takes passengers to walk from check-in to departure gate) is, experts say, notoriously difficult.

No, this is just a pretext to strip yet more privacy away from ordinary people. Where will it end? Will DNA samples soon be demanded from all who use airports? Will your fingerprints be required if you pay by credit card in shops or restaurants? The logic is no less far-fetched than what BAA is about to impose at Terminal 5.

Perhaps, though, you feel that we should be very proud. After all, it's another first for Britain! In no other country are domestic passengers fingerprinted before they can travel. The next time our politicians start to lecture the Chinese on human rights (not that they have the guts to do that very often), this will be another brick that can be hurled back at our glasshouse. “Never mind about us,” they will say. “When are you going to let your own citizens travel freely within Britain without fingerprinting and photographing them?”

And there will be no answer to that. Of course, it will be declared - as always - that “the innocent have nothing to fear”. That's true, in theory. But are you happy to trust the people who run the airline industry with your fingerprints? As thousands of angry passengers will attest, you can't even trust them with your suitcase.