How much are we being watched in our everyday lives without realising?

Last week I took a bold step. I disabled my personal location sharing on my iPhone. It hadn’t been available to many people, but switching it off felt like a monumental decision as a tech journalist. I could go where I pleased without anyone knowing my precise location. It was liberating. That lasted about five minutes. I forgot the car keys have a Bluetooth tag that is used at least three times a week to hunt them down; it is a shared device, though, so even if my own phone is in stealth mode, the network will ping the tag’s location to anyone with access. That is the trade-off we face every day: we give up elements of our privacy for convenience. I could see my husband’s iPhone location in real time – somewhere over the North Atlantic Ocean on a transatlantic flight – and its battery status (plugged in and charging according to the app). I resisted the urge to remotely send an alert to his phone to amuse myself. [ Is location tracking the new norm? ‘I can easily see where 80% of the people I know are’Opens in new window ]Tracking each other’s precise location isn’t a regular occurrence in our household. We occasionally use it to see if it is a good time to start on dinner if a message goes unanswered, or to remind the other to pick up milk if we see they are on the way home. READ MOREBut that is only one example. How much are we being watched in our everyday lives without realising? It depends on how many smart devices you use and encounter. Every night, my smart home alarm arms itself automatically. The system is remotely monitored by both the security company and the adults in the house. If a window or door opens after a certain time, a notification pops up. Ditto when the alarm is armed or disarmed. The days of wandering home at 5am and swearing that you crossed the threshold at 2am are gone. If the alarm doesn’t tell on you, the cameras watching you will. Walk down any Irish street, and you will notice a relatively new addition: the video doorbell. Intended to beef up home security and deter the rise of the “porch pirate”, as they are known in the US, these smart doorbells have become almost expected. The high-tech bell is more often used here to check if a child came home wearing a school jumper or not, and to keep an eye out for the cat. Occasionally, it catches me at 3am on bin day, bleary-eyed and cramming things into an over-stuffed recycling bin. Or plugging in the car to charge because inevitably I’ve forgotten to do it and I am deep in (justified) range anxiety territory. Either way, it is a dead giveaway that I haven’t managed to make it to bed yet. It is one of the perils of having a smart home. While it offers a certain level of convenience, you can’t do anything without your devices ratting you out. Once, while away at a conference in the US, I texted my husband who was at home in Dublin. “What did you burn for dinner?” The smart smoke alarm had alerted me that there was smoke detected in the hallway, a feature that was intended to give homeowners a heads-up before the alarms start blaring, but was also a handy eye on the house. “Feck off with your smart smoke alarm,” was his entirely appropriate response. Speaking of the car, even that has its own data connection and app, which allows anyone logged in to see the car’s current location and details of my recent journeys, such as the time and distance, plus the average speed. The maps app I use in the car for sat nav saves my most recent journeys, and whether I got directions or just viewed the location. [ Humans must always be responsible for AIOpens in new window ]On my way to the office, I pass a growing number of houses installing security cameras, relatively inexpensive systems made by Amazon, Google, Tapo, Ezviz and others to watch out for our property. When something happens, the footage can be shared with gardaí – or in a local WhatsApp group to help keep the neighbours informed. But it can also be monitored by anyone with access to the account, and our every move is being increasingly documented and, in most cases, uploaded to the cloud. There are occasionally good reasons to share location data. Among friend groups, we frequently use the live location feature in WhatsApp on nights out to either track each other down to meet or make sure we all get home safely at the end of the night, setting sharing for an hour. It occasionally backfires, though, causing more anxiety than reassurance. Once, when I made a detour on the way home, one spotted the changed route and immediately thought something catastrophic had happened. It was much less interesting: I was getting milk rather than hitting an ATM to pay a ransom demand.The taxis I get into often have a dashcam installed too, viewing both inside and outside the car. On those occasions, I immediately become more aware of any conversations happening in the car. More personal cars on the road are also installing the devices, usually for insurance purposes. It has become so commonplace that when a road crash happens, gardaí put out a call for any dashcam footage that may have been captured by passersby. Not even the family pets are immune. GPS-enabled pet trackers are constantly finding their way into my social media feeds, offering us an easy way to watch where our pets go and how active they are. Our cat has not one, but two trackers – a GPS one made for pets and a Bluetooth AirTag on her collar. She recently went missing for two weeks, and while I’d like to be able to tell you that the trackers played a key role in locating her, she had managed to lose the collar off one – we were waiting on a replacement – and she had slipped the AirTag collar off a few days before she went missing. I could, however, tell you where she lost the AirTag: 3.5 metres behind a high garden wall. I couldn’t hear the alert, but the location tracking on the app led me straight to it. [ ‘Duo is the most pricey iPhone to date’: reactions to Apple’s foldable phoneOpens in new window ]Apple intended the tags to track items rather than pets or people. But the tags started turning up in the most unlikely of places: in cars, hidden by ex-partners, slipped into the pockets of women in bars or on the street. The company had to introduce more safety features, including a regular chirp if the tag is not connected to the owner’s phone for a few hours. That would alert you to an unknown tracker and allow you to dispose of it, along with a pop-up on your phone. The cat’s collar and tag eventually turned up, much faster than the cat herself. All that data can add up to a frighteningly accurate picture of your daily life. And in the wrong hands, it can be weaponised. Things are about to get even more difficult. The rise in popularity of devices such as smart glasses means we are liable to be recorded without our knowledge in places where you previously could have expected privacy. Meta has seen significant backlash for its expensive AI-enabled glasses that can record video, with the only indication they are active being a small LED on the frame. That has led to a growing number of videos where someone wearing the glasses has covertly recorded interactions – usually with women – and posted them online for likes and shares. While Meta has taken action to stop the indicator light from being disabled or otherwise tampered with, and removed some of the videos, that does not mean the problem has gone away.