… Even if we travel into the desert or far out over the ocean, we must be resigned to the idea that someone could be watching, via satellite or drone. For much of our lives, as we go about our business in the heavily surveilled spaces of modern cities, carrying the seductively packaged trackers we still quaintly call our “phones,” we are under observation.
What is privacy? It’s not just an occasional preference for solitude. It is the capacity to conceal things: parts of our bodies, aspects of our lives. Privacy is more than solitude; it’s not simply visual. We sweep through the world trailing clouds of metadata, and, with new and inexpensive tools to store and process it, pictures of our intimacies are being drawn that are not only descriptive, but actually predictive, of how we will behave, given certain inputs. CONT.
Hari Kunzru, New York Times