What Everybody Knows About You: Data Collection and Privacy in 2026
In the digital era, it seems like the hope for personal privacy is lost. We all hear stories of daily privacy violations along with scary predictions for the future. But what is really happening? This eleven-part series scans the landscape of modern life and lists the ways that organizations track you.
Using information from public sources, I’ll list what’s being collected and describe a bit about how the data is used, because not all uses are harmful. The data collection scene is not the Wild West—at least, not large parts of it.
The sections of this series are:
- What your home knows about you
- What your car knows about you
- What your watch knows about you
- What your browser knows about you
- What retailers know about you
- What banks know about you
- What your church knows about you
- What governments know about you
- What your employer knows about you
- Conclusion: A Stunning Mosaic
I performed an enormous number of web searches for the series. For this purpose I used DuckDuckGo, which promises not to track or record my searches. I bet that if I had used one of the other popular search engines, it would have quickly figured out what my research topic was and perhaps might even have offered to write the series for me.
Because the Mozilla Foundation has done some of the most impressive work on the effects of technology and privacy, I talked to Lauren Hendry Parsons, a privacy and digital rights advocate at the Foundation. Before joining the Mozilla Foundation, Parsons chaired the VPN Trust Initiative and served on the board of the Benton Institute’s Internet Infrastructure Coalition.
She says that no single development in recent years marks a qualitative shift in privacy. Instead, privacy has degraded gradually through an « information ecosystem » combining better data collection (through the increase in cameras and recording devices, improvements in their accuracy, and the use of biometrics), the power of machine learning and LLMs to analyze data, powerful chips allowing faster calculations, and the growth of cloud-based storage to make data retention easier.
Some of the Foundation’s current campaigns can be found on their « Join us » page.
This series won’t focus on the most intrusive forms of spying. They’re widespread and alarming, certainly, but they have also made headlines and don’t need more commentary from me. I will let readers go elsewhere for such historic surveillance threats as Echelon, the worldwide wiretapping project run over many decades by the United States and its Anglophone allies, or the revelations of Edward Snowden.
Pegasus « spyware » combined with analysis through tools such as Palantir can be very dangerous to journalists and human rights activists, but very few people (so far) suffer this kind of violation.
The next section of this article starts my detailed catalog with what your home knows about you.
