If you’re reading this article on a phone, a tablet, or a laptop, the odds are very high that you’ve currently got a camera pointed at your face, and a bunch of other tech like microphones, GPS, and biometric sensors keeping track of you and your surroundings. Not to mention, the other “smart” devices featuring Amazon’s Alexa or Apple’s Siri that may be lurking somewhere close by.

All of those devices are collecting data about you—and about the people and things you interact with—and sending them over the internet to… well, it’s hard to say. As researchers of data, industry, and culture, we have learned that once information like this gets collected, there’s no telling who’s going to end up with it, or what such people might do with it. And they're collecting more and more data with every passing day. For instance, in March, Amazon announced that it will no longer allow Echo device users to prevent the recordings of their voices from getting sent automatically to Amazon's "cloud" service for processing. That means the millions of people who own such devices will have to trust Amazon’s cybersecurity—and its good intentions—to keep those recordings safe for the rest of their lives.

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Most of us are okay with this, most of the time. Partly because data is invisible, and we don’t have to think about it too much. Partly because we enjoy the convenience of having easy access to the internet and the many services it offers. And partly because we don’t have much of a choice; to escape data surveillance in the 2020s, you’d basically need to live like a hermit.

But more and more, we hear stories about how sharing data can put us, and the people we love, at risk without our knowledge or consent. Women who use period tracker apps are in danger of arrest under new laws that........

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