Big Brother wants to know what you're up to, to monitor your activities and make sure you are doing the approved program, and nothing else. He knows your name and wants to know your business.

Little Brother doesn't care about you, personally. He just wants to know about people like you, how many are there, what are they doing as a group, what are their preferences. This brother doesn't really care what you do as much as what people like you do. He doesn't know your name but knows he wants your business.

The ability to collect, store and process data about people has become the most significant characteristic about our social landscape. Political dictatorships can keep track of our individual activities to identify and punish aberrant behavior. Commercial entities monitor our group behavior so we can be exploited and manipulated economically. Even if the society zealously protects individual rights and freedom, the ability to predict and anticipate collective behavior will allow another mechanism other than the market to regulate commerce, trade and consumer/vendor behavior. This mechanism may eventually not even be under human control; it will be constantly managed by software to optimize profit.

When you add the ability to communicate instantaneously, plus the computing power to automatically tailor the message to each individual, then we can look forward to the day when we will be constantly bombarded by commercial messages designed to appeal to our specific tastes and financial status, and keyed to the the time of day and our geographical location.

Orwell foresaw a world where a stranger could watch you do your morning exercises and scold you if you were not sufficiently enthusiastic.
Soon our communications devices will remind us when we are approaching establishments that carry our favorite foods or that sell items that pertain to our hobbies, urging us to buy and enticing us with discounts.

Even today, people are willing to give commercial organizations personal information (in return for credit or other favors) they would resist sharing with any government, and they also give up the right to prevent that information itself from becoming a commodity, to be bought and sold on the open market. They gladly sign over details about themselves that they would not share with even their closest friends because they are required to complete a transaction, and they give up their right to prevent this information to become available to others they do not even know.

We live in a society that rejects a national identity card as an invasion of our privacy, but glady turn over our social security number to dozens of commercial organizations because it has become a defacto convenient data index for the information infrastructure. It is not stolen from us by a sinister tyranny, we give it away freely to those who sincerely mean us no harm and only wish to "serve us better".