Opinions

This Is How Many Times You’re Surveilled Throughout the Day

BYRuman Baig

August 4, 2026

Do you remember watching that episode of Black Mirror, The Entire History of You, back in 2011, where everyone has an implant behind their ear that records every glance, conversation, and moment of their lives? I remember thinking how dystopian it was, that we’d never actually get there. In 2026, I think we have.

Before I get into the details, here’s the example that prompted me to dig deeper. Students across India are currently protesting, demanding the resignation of the Education Minister after the leak of the NEET examination papers (India’s national medical entrance exam). During the protests, Delhi Police officers were seen filming students at close range using AI-powered smart glasses, giving them real-time identification. In fifteen years, what once felt almost impossible has become a living reality. And its effects aren’t just personal. They’re political, economic and, I think, far darker than we realize.

So how much are we actually surveilled throughout the day, where does this data go, and how is it used? According to Rakesh Raghuvanshi, CEO of Sekel Tech, a company specializing in AI-powered customer engagement, “an estimated 402–495 million terabytes of data are created every day across the world,” driven by smartphones, connected devices, social media, streaming platforms, IoT ecosystems and AI applications. On an individual level, he notes that close to 70 per cent of the world’s data is now generated directly by users, turning everyday digital behavior into one of the biggest sources of information for tech platforms.

Checking the weather, unlocking your phone with Face ID, tapping your bank card, asking ChatGPT a question, watching TikTok for ten minutes, or walking past a shop with location services enabled all leave digital traces. Individually they seem insignificant, but together, they form an extraordinarily detailed picture of how we live, what we buy, where we go, and who we know.

I know what you’re thinking: “I don’t use AI that much and I’m barely on social media, so I probably don’t contribute much data.” Well, let me take you through a slice of a typical day of mine.

I wake up at 8:00 A.M. and, before I’m even fully conscious, I open my fitness tracker to log my sleep score, my coffee intake, and even where I am in my cycle. Minutes into being awake, I’ve already handed over health data most people would consider deeply personal.

My food delivery app already knows my caffeine habits well enough to nudge me with an offer at exactly the right moment, before I have a chance to make my coffee. As a freelancer moving across the city for meetings, ride-hailing and navigation apps are quietly logging my routes too.

At lunch, an ad for a lipstick shade I’d only just discussed with my sister appears mid-scroll. I pay with my card, adding another entry to the financial trail. By evening, WhatsApp is offering me a calorie-deficit meal plan, eerily timed against a message where I’d admitted feeling guilty about that same lunch. At this point, I’m less alarmed and more genuinely impressed by how accurately these systems anticipate me.

That’s just a slice of one day. Which brings us to the real question, if this is all so normal, should we even care? Every time a website asks us to “accept cookies,” isn’t it just handing us a sweet treat in exchange for a little information? Not quite.

The data I hand over on a day like that rarely stays with the app I knowingly gave it to. It often passes through a wider network: cloud providers, analytics firms, advertising partners, payment processors, fraud prevention services. I click “agree” assuming my data lives with one company. In reality, it’s often handed off, shared, and resold. Think of it as a living, breathing commodity.

To be fair, this isn’t inherently sinister. The same tech that flagged my caffeine habit also reroutes me around traffic and catches suspicious activity on my bank account. The problem is that convenience comes with a receipt I never read. A single data point about me may reveal very little, but combined over time, my location, purchases, health data and browsing habits build a detailed picture of my life. The same systems that personalize my feed can also shape what I consume, quietly narrowing the internet I once imagined would connect us all.

This is where the value of that data shifts. Harvard Business School professor emerita Shoshana Zuboff coined the term “surveillance capitalism” to describe an economic model where human experience itself becomes raw material for predicting and influencing future behavior. As she argues in The Harvard Gazette, we entered the digital world expecting “empowerment, the democratization of knowledge, and help with real problems.” But the commercial value of our data proved too lucrative to ignore. That logic, she says, has now expanded well beyond Big Tech into healthcare, insurance, finance, education, and the growing world of “smart” products.

Perhaps the biggest issue isn’t that my data is being collected. It’s that I don’t fully understand what I’m agreeing to. As Raghuvanshi puts it, “over 70 per cent accept without a complete review because they are lengthy, technical, and difficult to interpret.” I care about privacy, like most people say they do, but I consent before I understand what I’m consenting to.

So how do I take some of that autonomy back? Not by selling the house or throwing my phone into the sea (tempting as that sounds some days). For me, it started with becoming a harder person to profile. I’ve gone through my privacy settings and turned off precise location sharing for apps that don’t need it, and revoked microphone and camera permissions from anything with no business asking. I’m auditing my phone every few months now, deleting what I haven’t opened in a year, since dormant apps can still be sitting on years of my data. Some people are taking this further. Italian fashion-tech label Capable Design has woven adversarial AI patterns into clothing designed to confuse facial recognition, reportedly misreading the wearer as a dog, a zebra, or a giraffe instead of a person.

The same thinking now applies to how I use AI. I’ve started using temporary chat modes where available, and checking whether I’ve opted out of my conversations training future models. I try to remember, too, that AI doesn’t just consume data, it consumes resources. Every prompt draws, however incrementally, on the electricity and water behind these systems, one more reason to use it with intention rather than endlessly.

Most importantly, stop treating every request for data as the price of entry. In an age where almost everything about us can become data, the most powerful thing we can do is decide, one permission at a time.

This Is How Many Times You’re Surveilled Throughout the Day

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This Is How Many Times You’re Surveilled Throughout the Day

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