For decades, digital privacy advocates have been warning the public to be more careful about what we share online. And for the most part, the public has cheerfully ignored them.

I am certainly guilty of this myself. I usually click “accept all” on every cookie request every website puts in front of my face, because I don’t want to deal with figuring out which permissions are actually needed. I’ve had a Gmail account for 20 years, so I’m well aware that on some level that means Google knows every imaginable detail of my life.

I’ve never lost too much sleep over the idea that Facebook would target me with ads based on my internet presence. I figure that if I have to look at ads, they might as well be for products I might actually want to buy.

But even for people indifferent to digital privacy like myself, AI is going to change the game in a way that I find pretty terrifying.

This is a picture of my son on the beach. Which beach? OpenAI’s o3 pinpoints it just from this one picture: Marina State Beach in Monterey Bay, where my family went for vacation.

To my merely-human eye, this image doesn’t look like it contains enough information to guess where my family is staying for vacation. It’s a beach! With sand! And waves! How could you possibly narrow it down further than that?

But surfing hobbyists tell me........

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