Does Privacy Exist? Spoiler: No.

We feared Big Brother. We never imagined millions of little brothers with AI.

The plane was stuck on the tarmac, the kind of slow-motion hell where you’ve doomscrolled Twitter and Facebook until even rage-bait feels like background noise. I’d already finished my daily meditation ritual — one of the few things that reliably lowers the temperature — and was texting a friend I was planning to meet later on the trip.

They mentioned, almost proudly, that they “keep a low profile” online.

Something about the confidence of that line caught me sideways.

Maybe it was boredom. Maybe curiosity. Maybe just the unholy combination of being trapped in a metal tube with nothing to do and a mind that loves to explore the edges of a thought. But I opened AI and typed in three simple pieces of information:

• their name

• their city

• their profession

Just enough breadcrumbs to know exactly who I meant. Then I added:

“Pretend you’re a CIA analyst. Build a comprehensive psychological and professional profile on this person.”

And it did.

Not a résumé.

Not a social media scrape.

Not a collection of fun facts.

It built a classified briefing.

It laid out how this person operates professionally — including distinctions in their work that only someone inside that very specific field would understand. It took their public breadcrumbs and wove them into patterns that felt uncomfortably intimate: not speculation, but interpretation. Like a colleague who’d sat through five years of meetings with them and quietly taken notes the whole time.

Then it gave me a list of questions I could ask to confirm its hypotheses.

And then — the part that made my stomach drop — it added lines like:

“If they seem suspicious you’re asking, pivot to this alternative phrasing instead.”

I was sitting in seat 21C holding what amounted to a personalized spy manual about a friend who barely uses the internet.

Generated because I was bored during deicing.

I sent it to them immediately — because some things are too unnerving to carry alone — and their reaction was what took this from creepy to clarifying. A few details were off, sure. But the core of it was… right. Eerily right. It identified traits and dynamics that might not even be obvious to people who work alongside them in the same field.

And that’s when it hit me:

If I can generate an intelligence profile on a low-profile friend during a tarmac delay, privacy is not a real thing anymore.

Not functionally.

Not socially.

Not emotionally.

Not in any way that matters.

And the uncomfortable truth is: privacy didn’t die.

The ability to pull back the curtain and see everything just got democratized.

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Privacy as a Luxury Good (And Why Even Corporations Rarely Used It Right)

Here’s the part most people miss: none of this is new.

For twenty years I’ve been in the belly of the beast — strategic consulting, audience segmentation, political polling, appended consumer datasets, donor models, voter files, public-health targeting, you name it. Data has always been the oxygen of advertising, persuasion, and politics.

Yes, the big players — campaigns, Fortune 100 brands, intelligence agencies — had access to detailed individual-level profiles long before AI.

But here’s the truth most people outside the industry never hear:

Even when you have the data, the juice often isn’t worth the squeeze.

Because to use that data well, you needed:

• analysts

• data scientists

• time

• infrastructure

• specialized software

• people who could build models

• money — sometimes a lot of money

There were so many situations where the research budget required to perfectly target someone would exceed the entire ad budget for the campaign. So instead of building ultra-perfect segments, we just… advertised broadly.

It wasn’t moral restraint.

It wasn’t ethics.

It wasn’t “respect for privacy.”

It was economics.

Even government agencies — the ones people assume are surveilling everything — only built full behavioral profiles on major targets. No one was analyzing your average citizen in granular detail. Not because they cared about your boundaries, but because it was too expensive.

Privacy wasn’t a right — it was a budget line.

Now?

AI does all the parts that used to require a team.

Suddenly the expensive part isn’t expensive anymore.

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AI’s Real Innovation Isn’t Data — It’s Interpretation

Everyone gets hung up on “AI has access to so much data,” but that’s not the story. We already lived in a data-saturated world. Your consumer profile and digital shadow have been fed into thousands of databases for over a decade.

The breakthrough is that AI doesn’t just retrieve data.

It interprets it.

It connects dots across:

• career history

• writing style

• sentiment

• online footprint

• biographical trivia

• tone

• patterns you didn’t know you were leaving behind

It synthesizes these things into models, predictions, insights, and psychological maps that used to take humans weeks or months to build — if they ever built them at all.

AI turned analysis — the hardest, most expensive part — into a commodity.

Which means the barriers to profiling someone are now:

1. curiosity

2. Wi-Fi

That’s it.

This is where people get blindsided:

It’s not “Big Brother” that should scare you. It’s millions of little brothers equipped with supercomputers.

The surveillance state didn’t get stronger — it got distributed.

And once power distributes, you never get it back.

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What Privacy Actually Was — And Why It’s Truly Gone

We pretend privacy used to be about control. Access. Boundaries. Secrets.

That’s not what privacy was.

Privacy was forgetting.

It was the natural erosion of information:

• memories fading

• stories softening

• rumors dying

• stupid teenage nights becoming myths

• pictures lost in a shoebox that never left the closet

• inside jokes drifting into haze

• identities dissolving and reforming as we grew

Human memory is not faithful.

It’s generous.

We literally evolved to misremember in ways that preserve relationships, communities, and emotional equilibrium. If humans remembered everything accurately, none of us could survive each other.

But digital memory never fades.

And AI never misremembers.

This is the real death blow:

Humans forget. Algorithms don’t.

The internet is not a record.

It’s a fossil bed.

And AI is the paleontologist that can reconstruct your entire species from a single bone.

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The Humiliation Economy (Millennials as Walking Evidence Files)

Nowhere is this more visible than in my generation.

Millennials were raised as the “good kids.”

We were told to keep our noses clean, build perfect résumés, curate ourselves for colleges and internships and eventual employers. We were told our reputations would define our futures.

But our adolescence was uploaded.

We had:

• AIM message logs

• MySpace profiles with sparkly GIFs

• early Facebook albums documenting every college night

• YouTube videos of talent shows no one should have recorded

• sorority/fraternity chaos captured on 2006-era digital cameras

• inside jokes posted publicly because we thought only our friends were watching

• bad fashion immortalized forever

• emotional overshares in status updates

We grew up believing two opposite things at once:

1. Reputation is everything.

2. Your entire unfiltered becoming-self is permanently archived.

And now, as adults, we’re judged not just for who we are — but for who we were before we even knew who we were becoming.

This is the millennial wound:

We become different people as we grow up, but the internet freezes our teenage selves forever.

And humiliation is now a currency used against us — personally, professionally, politically.

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Generations in the Light

Gen X — The Last People With Real Privacy

Their mistakes died in bedrooms and basements.

Their embarrassing nights live only in foggy stories.

Their teenage phases dissolved naturally.

No digital trail.

No algorithmic fossil record.

No receipts.

Millennials — The Tragic Middle Children of Surveillance

We were the first generation raised on the internet

and the last generation to believe privacy was real.

We carry the contradiction in our bones.

We toggle between:

• performing professionalism

• fearing the archive

• living with the anxiety of constant potential exposure

We were shaped by a world where every identity shift is discoverable, searchable, recoverable.

Gen Z — The “Fuck It” Generation

They don’t pretend.

They don’t expect privacy.

They’ve been screenshot, canceled, and chronically online since middle school.

And because privacy never existed for them, they seem to have evolved past shame.

They are more authentically themselves because they assume nothing is hidden anyway.

They live in the open because they always have.

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Privacy Theater (The Ritual We Perform Because We’re Terrified)

Somewhere along the way, we collectively decided that if we just clicked one more “Ask app not to track,” we’d get our privacy back.

And Big Tech — being both savvy and extremely aware of human psychology — realized that people don’t need actual protection; they just need to feel protected. So they gave us privacy theater.

Cookie banners, for example, don’t stop anything. They exist because the law told companies to warn us about the thing they were already doing and fully intended to keep doing. So they invented a pop-up that 99.8% of humans scroll past and hit “Accept All.” That’s not privacy — that’s a ritual. A digital rosary.

The same goes for “Turn off location services” or “Limit ad tracking.” These toggles are like putting a single towel under your door during a hurricane and calling it storm preparedness. Everything important is still getting through — purchase behaviors, browsing history, sentiment analysis, device fingerprinting, metadata about your metadata.

People cling to these rituals because they want to believe the monster has rules. They want to believe someone out there is watching out for them. They want to believe the machine is something you can opt out of.

So every day we perform our little rites:

• We click the banner.

• We toggle the switch.

• We skim the privacy policy.

• We tell ourselves Apple is protecting us.

• We tell ourselves we’re “limiting tracking.”

• We pretend our VPN is some kind of invisibility cloak.

All of it is designed to create the illusion of control in a world where we have none.

Because the truth — the real truth — is that the data engine is fully decoupled from these rituals. It churns underneath everything, unbothered, processing every action into billions of micro-inferences the moment you exist online.

Privacy theater isn’t protection.

It’s sedation.

It’s the warm blanket over our eyes while the doctor does the painful part.

And the longer we cling to these rituals, the more unprepared we are for what the next stage looks like.

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The Early Days (You Think This Is Scary? This Is the Tutorial.)

Right now, AI feels overwhelming because it’s new. But in the timeline of technological transformation, we’re in year zero. Generative AI today is the PalmPilot compared to what the iPhone eventually became.

People keep talking like “this” is the thing. This moment. These models. These capabilities.

But we’re not even close.

We haven’t hit:

• real-time emotional inference

• AR glasses that record everything we see

• multimodal models silently analyzing tone, micro-expressions, and intent

• voiceprint-based personality predictions

• long-distance behavioral detection

• political modeling at true psychological depth

• employer risk scoring that updates the way credit scores do

• AI that can contextualize your entire digital past to predict your next year

When those arrive — and they will — everything we’re anxious about now will feel quaint. Mashed peas on the high chair compared to the steak knives coming next.

Imagine a world where:

• a conversation with your spouse gets live-scored by their phone for emotional honesty

• political campaigns run continuously updating models on how every voter’s opinions are shifting in real time

• employers can predict burnout before the employee feels it

• dating apps don’t match on profiles; they match on psychometric destiny

• every customer service call you make feeds into a long-term profile of your temperament

• “privacy breaches” aren’t events — they’re just Tuesday

And we’ll get there not because someone wanted it, but because someone built a proof of concept, and someone else optimized it, and a startup productized it, and the market rewarded it.

By the time you realize the ground has shifted, it’s already the new reality.

We’re not living in the dystopia.

We’re living in the loading screen.

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The Upside — Authenticity as the Only Win Condition Left

Here’s the twist I didn’t see coming until I started watching Gen Z: transparency doesn’t always destroy you. Sometimes it frees you.

Our generation (Millennials) was raised to believe reputation was currency and shame was lethal. Every misstep carried the potential to ruin everything. That’s why privacy theater exists — it was built for people like us.

But Gen Z?

They were born into omnipresence. Into screenshots. Into Finstas. Into TikTok families. Into the entire internet watching them grow up in real time.

And here’s what happened:

They adapted by becoming unblackmailable.

You can’t weaponize someone’s past when they’ve already posted worse themselves.

They grew up knowing:

• everyone has receipts

• everyone has cringe

• everyone has chaos

• everyone has phases

• everyone has versions of themselves they abandoned

• everyone is permanently visible

So instead of performing perfect, they perform real. And it’s messy, but it works.

And that’s the thing older generations don’t understand:

Shame loses its power in a world where everyone has the same scars.

This is where authenticity becomes a survival strategy.

Not idealism.

Not virtue.

Not morality.

Strategy.

Because when the archive is omnipresent and interpretation is automated, the only safe move is to stop pretending you’re someone you’ve never been.

That’s why I’m convinced one of the next killer apps will be AI-powered dating that generates briefing books — not as manipulation, but as clarity. Because clarity makes us more human, not less.

In an overexposed world, authenticity isn’t noble.

It’s adaptive.

It’s efficient.

It’s the only thing that scales.

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So Does Privacy Exist? (The Only Honest Answer We Have Left)

Not in the way we were promised.

Not in the way the laws pretend.

Not in the way the toggle switches imply.

Not in the way we wish technology worked.

Not in the way that lets us sleep at night.

But here’s the part that matters:

Privacy isn’t coming back.

Authenticity is what replaces it.

Because when your entire becoming-self is exposed, the only life that works is one that doesn’t require you to hide. The only relationships that sustain are the ones where you don’t have to curate your past. The only careers that survive are the ones where your humanity isn’t a liability.

Millennials were taught that privacy was the thing that allowed us to reinvent ourselves. But reinvention was never about hiding who we were — it was about outgrowing who we were.

And in a world where every version of us is visible, maybe the final frontier isn’t avoiding exposure.

Maybe it’s developing the inner freedom to withstand it.

Privacy may not survive this era.

But authenticity can.

And authenticity — the kind that lives beyond shame and performance — might be the only thing left with the power to keep us human.

—David