Have we all traded our anonymity for convenience?

Do you ever feel like you’re being watched?

When I’m navigating through crowds at the Queen Victoria Market and realise the slow walkers in front of me have their phones aloft, an uneasy fear settles over me that my annoyed expression will be captured for posterity in the video they’re filming. I have to train my face into something more kind because I’ve seen what happens when unsuspecting people morph into memes after they unknowingly get cast in the role of “mean background actor #14” in a piece of content, the likes of which are being captured by everyday people, every single day, all over the world.

A few months ago, while leaving a cinema and walking towards the railway station, I felt an arm snake around my waist as a voice close to my ear asked how I was doing. I turned towards the voice, expecting to see a friend, and recoiled when I realised it was a creepy stranger with no boundaries who had decided it was OK to touch me in public. After I chastised him and demanded he leave me alone, my first thought was: “Was someone filming this as a prank?”

It might sound like narcissistic paranoia – the thought that I’m special enough to be the internet’s main character – but I’ve witnessed it happen enough for the fear not to be unfounded.

I was online in 2014 when a teenager working as a cashier at a Target in the US (no relation to our Target) went viral all over the world, after a customer who thought he was cute took his picture and posted it on the internet. It didn’t take long for 16-year-old “Alex From Target” to be invited as a guest on Ellen. That’s how the internet worked then. And while our personalised, niche, algorithmic feeds mean we’re not always exposed to the same stories these days, it’s how the internet still works. That’s how we know so much information about that couple caught canoodling on camera at a Coldplay concert, after all.

On a recent episode of his podcast Panic World, longtime web culture journalist Ryan Broderick talked about how he once pleaded with his mother, a flight attendant, to hide out of sight if she ever noticed unruly passengers whip out their phones to film altercations. Broderick has covered memes and trends and news from the darkest corners of the internet for so long that he knows the kind of real-world impacts which come from unknowingly being caught in the crosshairs of the content machine.

It’s good advice, but being observed and tracked and known is something we have less and less control over. We opt in to let our loved ones follow us on tracking apps such as Find My Friends, and parents consent to let their kids’ kindergartens send troves of photos of the day’s activities in the classroom via apps such as Storypark. But we’re also captured walking through our neighbourhoods on camera doorbells every day without realising it. Every app we use that doesn’t require payment is gathering crumbs of information on us – because when a tool is free, our personal data is the price.

We were told this tracking was a service, that “allowing cookies” simply made our online lives more personalised. But the recent news of AI companies going to war with the US government – or kowtowing to the Pentagon to help fine-tune war machines – is proof of how our apathy towards casual surveillance has dangerous and far-reaching effects.

Not so suddenly, it’s become clear that the things we Google and the locations we plug into our GPS, and the online shopping we do could be weaponised to train AI models to spy on us and our neighbours, and to make autonomous weapons more precise.

We traded our anonymity for convenience a long time ago, and the toothpaste has well and truly left the tube. Suddenly, the paranoia about being watched feels less like the ramblings of a tin-hatted conspiracy theorist and more like a delayed, obvious reaction to this new reality.

Every phone capturing strangers’ mundane movements, every request for constant updates via satellite tracking, every Ring doorbell installed for “safety” is a tool for something much bigger that we can’t even hope to control. Paranoia might be the only logical response.