According to Fast Company, we’re heading into an AI-driven privacy crisis that makes our current data problems look tame. The article comes from a consumer privacy advocate who argues we completely failed to build proper privacy infrastructure during the social media era. Instead, we bought into the narrative that data collection was the price for “free” services and that knowledge equals power. Now AI is supercharging this dynamic, making our personal information both more valuable to companies and more vulnerable to exploitation than ever before.
We already dropped the ball
Here’s the thing: we had our chance. During the rise of social media and targeted advertising, we could have demanded real privacy protections. But we didn’t. We let tech companies convince us that trading our personal data for convenience was a fair deal. And honestly, most people didn’t understand the long-term consequences. Now we’re living with the results – a surveillance economy where our most intimate details are bought and sold without our meaningful consent.
AI changes everything
But AI? AI makes this whole situation exponentially worse. Think about it – suddenly companies aren’t just collecting data about what you clicked or bought. They’re building models that can predict your behavior, infer your emotions, and potentially manipulate your decisions. Your data becomes fuel for systems that learn and adapt in ways we can’t fully anticipate. And the scary part? We’re making the exact same mistakes we made with social media – rushing headfirst into new technology without asking the hard questions about privacy and control.
Who owns you?
The core issue here is ownership. Basically, we’ve been treating personal data as something companies can freely take and monetize. But what if we flipped that model? What if our data actually belonged to us, and companies had to negotiate for access? That’s the superpower we’ve been giving away. Instead of being the product, we could be the shareholders in our own digital identities. But we’re running out of time to make that shift before AI systems become so embedded in our lives that changing course becomes impossible.
Where do we go from here?
So what happens now? We’re at a critical inflection point. Either we learn from our past failures and build privacy-first AI systems, or we sleepwalk into a world where artificial intelligence knows us better than we know ourselves. The stakes are higher than ever because AI doesn’t just use our data – it learns from it, builds on it, and creates new insights that could be used for or against us. The time for passive acceptance is over. We either demand control now, or we lose it forever.
