Imagine waking up one morning in the not so distant future. You reach for your phone and none of your apps work, you can’t access your email, all your social media accounts have been deleted.

You can’t get any money out at the bank because your facial recognition is not working and you have no way of hailing an autonomous taxi.

You find out you have no job because you can no longer access the app that gives you shifts on a flexible basis.

People on the street avoid you, they all know you have been blocked.

Maybe you criticised the big monopoly tech provider a little too much, maybe you did not want them to access and share as much of your personal information that they wanted to. But now you are isolated with no means to get your life back.

Does this dystopian scenario seem far fetched?

Recently, around two hundred people were banned from using Google services after they tried to take advantage of a tax loophole, and sell the Pixel smartphone whilst pocketing a tax saving. Those people woke up and couldn’t access their email, search engines, Google drives.

That would be disruptive to most people, but imagine as Google’s reach moves deeper into our lives, how isolated we could find ourselves if we were blocked by the tech behemoth.

You will read many articles about the death of Liberalism in relation to neoliberal policy failures, intellectually stale centre-ground policies etc. The biggest threat to Liberalism is a future where we choose to sacrifice privacy, a central pillar of personal liberalism for the great benefits tech innovation offers. Where we are happy with huge tech monopolies because they are able to offer us more benefits cheaply.

I say this with no suggestion that we should choose to fight this trade-off and be rigid in our position, but we should aim to empower the individual to control the fuel for all of this innovation, information.

A Digital Citizen’s Bill of Rights is a policy already supported by the Lib Dems that would enshrine key principles in law about the use of personal information that policy would then be based on. Policy is processual and takes far too long when you consider the speed of innovation, setting key principles will provide a good foundation for policy-making.

Education is a key factor, as a 34 year-old I grew up during a time where hardly anybody had a mobile phone and now everybody has a smartphone and other devices. I think about how my information is used, but if you talk to 20 year-old they are much less concerned. They have already accepted the trade-off in order to be connected and access the huge benefits that technology offers.

We then need to give people the ability to monitor and control the use of their information by creating a tool much like a credit file. We could then restrict the use of our information if it is being used in a way we do not like and at least how it is being used would be transparent.

There is also an opportunity to address inequality by adopting a citizen’s dividend system to our personal information, which has been described as the new oil that will fuel the future economy, perhaps through personal accounts or maybe through an information tax on the big tech giants that already are and will increasingly become monopolies.

Maybe the future of Liberalism is one in which we sacrifice key economic and personal liberal principles like breaking up monopolies and the right to privacy, in favour of a whole variety of new choices and freedoms. But a key liberal principle that cannot be sacrificed in all of this, is the right of the individual to decide.

* Darren Martin is the Press and Social Media Officer for the Hackney Lib Dems. He is a council candidate for next year's local elections.