You know that feeling where it suddenly seems like you’re being watched, but when you actually look around there’s nothing there? No one behind you, no obvious reason for it… just a weird moment you brush off and carry on with your day.

Thing is, it’s not as far-fetched as it used to be.

We’re surrounded by devices now that are constantly picking things up. Not in an obvious way — they just sit there doing their job. The TV, the car, the office tech, even appliances at home. We carry around a microphone and camera (our smart phones) in our pockets everywhere we go these days, and by signing up to apps like WhatsApp we’re even giving away access to (and probably ownership of) all the photos our phones store for us.

All these seemingly harmless devices track usage, habits, preferences… all the little details that don’t seem like much on their own, but start to add up pretty quickly. And a lot of that information doesn’t stay on the device — it gets sent off somewhere else, usually without us thinking twice about it.

How did we let this happen to us?

If you go back a bit, it’s actually quite a shift. When smartphones first became a thing, the focus was on how useful they were — apps, convenience, having everything in one place. And that was great; it still is. But somewhere along the way, the trade-off became normalised. We got used to giving away bits of information in exchange for that convenience.

Now it’s not just phones. Everything’s connected — homes, workplaces, even the spaces in between. It all makes life easier in a lot of ways, but it does mean privacy isn’t quite what it used to be.

From where I sit, working around data, it’s becoming pretty clear that the more connected things get, the harder it is to keep anything truly private. It’s not really a question of whether information is being collected anymore — it’s more about how much, where it ends up, and what its being used for.

With the rapid uptake of Artificial Intelligence, it’s just going to get more intrusive and harder to control. That’s the price we pay for convenience and advances in technology, whether we want it or not.

Being a naturally cynical person, I’ve worried about how much of my personal freedom I’m giving away, unwittingly, to the algorithms and big tech companies. To make matters worse, I’m giving it to them free and on their terms, so that they can manipulate my spending and even my thinking! 

A real-life example

I have friends who allow their lives to be controlled by Alexa – it was gifted to them by a family member living in the USA in the very early days of Alexa being a thing - and every visit to their home reminds me that data is also being collected about me, without my permission. Alexa even interrupts our conversations with constant reminders of things they’ve asked it to do for them. 

I pity the poor Amazon workers who get to listen to our incredibly boring conversations and then try to transcribe them, before annotating them and feeding them into decision-making systems.  Though these days AI will no doubt be doing this, so the poor Amazon workers are probably retraining for new careers or have taken early retirement!

The saddest thing is that our Alexa-using friends have no idea that it’s even happening and are really proud of having the means to turn the music down without having to leave the comfort of their La-Z-Boy chairs!

Clawing back control – an exercise in futility and punishment

I thought I’d try to claw back some of the control before the situation became out of control. Easier said than done, unfortunately, and while it’s a complex and hugely time-consuming exercise (even if you are tech-savvy enough to know what to do and where to do it) it’s pretty much beyond the capability of the average Joe. And of course, the big guys are well ahead of this anyway, with lots of punishment built in, should you try to fight back and try to reclaim your privacy.

I use the internet for research mainly – whether I’m shopping for products and services, checking on health issues, booking movie tickets, or planning holidays – and mostly I appreciate all this stuff being at my fingertips, in fact I’d be lost without it. And this is exactly how the control is maintained by the big guys. I rely on finding the nearest place to purchase something, being able to check stock levels at multiple stores, learning where the closest tradie is based (not that being close to their base is ever reflected in the cost of their travel charge!), checking the price of flights and finding accommodation in my holiday destinations etc. But as soon as I don’t allow for the supplier of searched products or services to know where I’m calling from (my GPS coordinates) I lose access to all that useful info.

I also heavily rely on my search history to revisit certain websites, or recall the name/identity of something I’d forgotten the name of (yes, it happens, especially as we age; it’s just a matter of time before it will get you too). One of my favourite uses of Google searches is identifying actors in TV programmes I’m currently watching, by where they’ve appeared previously. I know I’ve seen them before as they seem really familiar, but I just can’t place them.

Shame we can’t do this with some of the other people in our lives when we see them out of context – think school reunions, former work colleagues, neighbours and social contacts. I’m sure it will only be a matter of time before this will be possible too, given all the face recognition software that’s appearing in our communities.

Faster than a speeding bullet train, and a lot more risky

The sixty-four-thousand-dollar question is how far will it go before we’ve surrendered our total privacy and control forever to help the billionaires get richer? The race has sped up enormously and unfortunately the sky is no longer the limit (ask all the new generation of rocket scientists out there), so all bets are off.

AI relies on data, lots of data – it feeds on it to provide search results and it needs to be kept current and relevant. We’ve all heard stories of wrong answers and info being provided by AI assistants, and even more frightening, bad or wrong advice being given. The fear is that the more our ability to think for ourselves gets dumbed down by algorithms doing the thinking for us, the less control we’ll have and the easier we’ll be manipulated.

But another big consequence we appear to overlook, which is really surprising given it’s happening far more frequently, is the risk of hackers getting their hands on our private data which has been shared over the internet. It’s a known fact that few consumer internet-connected devices are very secure and we are naively providing the bad guys with an Aladin’s cave full of goodies.

If you’d like to have a deeper dive into this fascinating phenomenon check this out