Someone is watching you. In modern life, we are all tracked and surveilled to a remarkable extent, thanks to the increasingly online world in which we operate. In Means of Control, former Wall Street Journal reporter Byron Tau has set out to explain how we got here (and that it’s much worse than you thought).

After 9/11, government agencies snapped into gear in terms of expanding their range of surveillance. They started keeping tabs on more and more people, monitoring phone calls, bank accounts, and travel histories, trying to spot the next Mohammad Atta before he could do any damage. This meant scanning the lives of a lot of innocent people. But there were still limits (legally and technically) to what they could catch in these information nets.

A few years later, things became easier for them. Social media encouraged us to put more and more of our lives in public. And then we helped out by providing our own tracking devices: we bought smartphones. All the apps we use to find our way around, manage our diets, chat with our friends, and take vacation pictures, are leaking information about us. (One of the obvious reminders that we are being tracked is the phenomenon of being chased from website to website by the same ad for jeans.)

The reason much of this data is collected is that at any given moment, your attention as a commodity (and therefore real estate on your screen) is being sold to advertisers. They need to know what you’ve searched before. And they need to know where you are, to know whether to tell you about a restaurant in Memphis or one in Marblehead. And where is the crucial piece of intel that can help identify you, in a sea of data. As Tau says: “Geolocation is the single most valuable piece of commercial data to come off those devices.”

Most of us are (however dimly) aware that our data is being harvested, and we’ve grudgingly accepted it as part of online life. We click “agree” to the app’s privacy policy without reading it. We ritually click “ok” on the cookie pop-ups and then a few more taps to get rid of random video pop-ups that are in the way of the recipe or news story we want to read.

And thus, we all—even those whose jobs mean they should know better—became blasé about how much data we share. As Tau describes, “In 2018, the fitness app Strava published a global ‘heatmap’ showing all of the popular running and cycling routes that its twenty-seven million users ran. Inside that data were the internal layouts of a number of unannounced military and intelligence facilities—mapped in the data of more than a billion exercise routes collated by the company.” People whose careers require security clearance were merrily sharing their locations with the world in order to keep up their jogging stats.

If you’re paranoid, you might already be taking evasive action. You could stay offline or deliberately set a device to run lots of searches and site visits from your IP address, drowning out your real interests in a flood of other stuff. Indeed, the idea of being one speck in a sandstorm of data is something many of us use to comfort ourselves.

But Tau points out that despite this, we can still be identified quickly. “Remember, your patterns are unique to you. It’s trivial to figure out who you are in a data set by where your phone ‘sleeps’ at night.” Many people in your city may have similar lifestyles; only one lives at your address.

Through some contacts in the security world, he is able to prove how easily one person can be narrowed down from available data, and their entire life mapped out.

And this information might not just be sought by the police or three-letter agencies. The brokers who sell our data can and do sell to anyone: advertisers, the government, foreign governments, criminals. The legal gray area of this data and its acquisition is part of Tau’s investigation. He explores just how the doctrine of “third party”—which holds that if we’ve given our information to anyone else (such as the phone company) we have no right to privacy over that information—has expanded to mean we have little to no legal rights to privacy over our harvested data. You clicked OK, remember?

And our involuntary data sharing is not just from our phones. Anything that is—or can be—connected to wifi or Bluetooth is potentially leaking data, and can be monitored. Your smart fridge, home security system, even your tires. Wait, tires? As Tau explains,

There is a tiny wireless tire pressure monitoring sensor, or TPMS, device inside each tire. And it is constantly broadcasting something like “I’m Acura tire k192e3bc and my tire pressure is 42 psi.” The message is meant for the central computer of your own car, but anybody with an antenna can listen in. Car manufacturers have never bothered to secure the transmission with encryption or any other kind of privacy mechanism.

Worse, you can’t even turn it off. Mechanics won’t do it. If you were handy enough (and had the equipment), you could deflate your tires, find the sensors and take them out. But your car’s default setting is to share your information with anyone. The un-opt-out-ability of this surveillance world is the relentless drumbeat of Tau’s book.

The methods of avoidance available require time and diligence, as well as living somewhere where cash VPNs, burner phones, and anonymous SIMS are even an option. This is still the case in the US, but I’ve lived in countries where I had to show my passport just to buy a SIM. Meanwhile, even in more liberal environments, things seem to be drifting that way. Official assumptions are creeping in that those who want privacy have something to hide. Shockingly, “In 2023, the U.K.’s Home Office even went so far as to propose a legislative measure that would make selling or even possessing an encrypted device a crime in and of itself.”

This is a subversion of our traditional civil liberties. Wanting privacy is itself sliding into probable cause for police interest.

Meanwhile, law enforcement agencies are in a double bind when it comes to monitoring the online world: Come down too heavy on obnoxious internet banter and it is oppressive; miss the “warning signs” of a nascent terror attack or school shooting and they’re failing to protect us.

And when legislation has been introduced supposedly for individual privacy, the results end up being unusable, as Tau demonstrated when he tried under California and EU law. Their privacy laws mean that members of the public are supposedly able to find out what’s been found out about them. But requests for a user’s own data wind up in a thicket of red tape that few could untangle (including having to furnish private companies with more personal information as “proof” of identity). As he grimly summarizes: “The truth is that no consumer or citizen can know what data is being collected about them or how it’s used, let alone consent.”

We also can’t consent on behalf of others, whose data we are unwittingly sharing.

Your phone, your wifi network, or your Bluetooth devices can share data about other people’s phones and devices nearby. Although Tau doesn’t discuss them, Apple’s Air tags (small trackers you can buy to put in your luggage or sports gear) depend on this kind of involuntary crowdsourcing. Their locations are tracked by pinging off any Apple devices in the vicinity. Knowing how regularly these things are used by creeps to track women (the stalker places a tag in the woman’s purse or her car), I’m outraged. I don’t want to be complicit in someone else’s crime, least of all helping some pervert track a victim. But it’s not a function I can switch off.

Because the government doesn’t need to track us. We track each other and don’t even know it.

In China, the state wants you to know you’re being watched. In America, the success lies in the secrecy. The government does not want you to notice the proliferation of license plate readers. It does not want citizens to understand that mobile phones are a surveillance system. It does not want people to realize that social media is being eavesdropped on and no group chat is truly private.

This is perhaps the creepiest part of this whole environment: our privacy and freedom are an illusion.