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to ignore. And the more
     intrusive a surveillance system is, the more likely it is to be hidden. Many of us
     would refuse a drug test before being hired for an office job, but many companies
     perform invasive background checks on all potential employees. Likewise, being tracked
     by hundreds of companies on the Internet—companies you’ve never interacted with or
     even heard of—feels much less intrusive than a hundred market researchers following
     us around taking notes.
    In a sense, we’re living in a unique time in history; many of our surveillance systems
     are still visible to us. Identity checks are common, but they still require us to
     show our ID. Cameras are everywhere, but we can still see them. In the near future,
     because these systems will be hidden, we may unknowingly acquiesce to even more surveillance.
    AUTOMATIC SURVEILLANCE
    A surprising amount of surveillance happens to us automatically, even if we do our
     best to opt out. It happens because we interact with others, and they’re being monitored.
    Even though I never post or friend anyone on Facebook—I have a professional page,
     but not a personal account—Facebook tracks me. It maintains a profile of non-Facebook
     users in its database. It tracks me whenever I visit a page with a Facebook “Like”
     button. It can probably make good guesses about who my friends are based on tagged
     photos, and it may well have the profile linked to other information it has purchased
     from various data brokers. My friends, and those sites with the Like buttons, allow
     Facebook to surveil me through them.
    I try not to use Google search. But Google still collects a lot of information about
     the websites I visit, because so many of them use Google Analytics to track their
     visitors. Again, those sites let Google track me through them. I use various blockers
     in my browser so Google can’t track me very well, but it’s working on technologies
     that will circumvent my privacy practices.
    I also don’t use Gmail. Instead, I use a local ISP and store all of my e-mail on my
     computer. Even so, Google has about a third of my messages, because many of the people
     I correspond with use Gmail. It’s not just Gmail.com addresses; Google hosts a lot
     of organizations’ e-mail, even though those organizations keep their domain name addresses.
     There are other examples. Apple has a worldwide database of Wi-Fi passwords, including
     my home network’s, from people backing up their iPhones. Many companies have my contact
     information because my friends and colleagues back up their address books in the cloud.
     If my sister publishes her genetic information, then half of mine becomes public as
     well.
    Sometimes data we only intend to share with a few becomes surveillance data for the
     world. Someone might take a picture of a friend at a party and post it on Facebook
     so her other friends can see it. Unless she specifies otherwise, that picture is public.
     It’s still hard to find, of course—until it’s tagged by an automatic face recognition
     system and indexed by a search engine. Now that photo can be easily found with an
     image search.
    I am constantly appearing on other people’s surveillance cameras.In cities like London, Chicago, Mexico City, and Beijing, the police forces have installed
     surveillance cameras all over the place. In other cities, like New York, the cameras
     are mostly privately owned. We saw the difference in two recent terrorism cases. The
     London subway bombers were identified by government cameras, and the Boston Marathon
     bombers by private cameras attached to businesses.
    That data is almost certainly digital. Often it’s just stored on the camera, on an
     endless loop that erases old data as it records new data. But increasingly, that surveillance
     video is available on the Internet and being saved indefinitely—and a lot of it is
     publicly searchable.
    Unless we take steps to prevent it, being captured on