AI-Powered Surveillance: Who's Watching You and How to Fight Back
Surveillance is no longer limited to intelligence agencies and law enforcement — it's now embedded in the commercial products and services millions of people use every day. Organizations track users to build advertising profiles, monitor employee behavior, and harvest data for resale, often supercharged by artificial intelligence. As cryptologist Bruce Schneier warned years ago, AI's ability to comb through actual conversations to extract commercially or legally valuable information has fundamentally changed the surveillance landscape. "I worry about AI-powered mental health apps and emotional support chatbots that seemingly require users to divulge sensitive information to function," added David Ruiz, senior privacy advocate at Malwarebytes, echoing Schneier's concerns.
Commercial surveillance is reaching new extremes. In July 2025, Perplexity launched its Comet browser, which CEO Aravind Srinivas described as capable of collecting data on everything users do outside the app — all to serve more relevant premium ads. The model assumes users will accept pervasive tracking in exchange for personalization. In the UK, meanwhile, a major supermarket chain announced plans to deploy facial recognition cameras in 150 additional stores before Christmas, extending biometric identification into routine retail environments. The combined effect is a surveillance infrastructure that captures browsing behavior, emotional states, biometric identifiers, and purchase patterns — often without meaningful informed consent.
The stakes extend well beyond targeted advertising. Collected personal data fuels further theft, enables targeting of critical industries, and provides leverage for both criminal enterprises and state-sponsored actors. Intelligence agencies, law enforcement, corporations, and cybercriminals each have distinct motivations, but the underlying pipeline is the same: collect, aggregate, and exploit. You can begin to understand your own exposure by running a browser fingerprint test to see what trackers can identify about your device, and a privacy checkup to evaluate your current defenses. If your personal data has already been compromised in a corporate breach, check it with the email breach checker and rotate any exposed credentials using a password checker.
Regulatory frameworks remain the primary structural defense against unchecked surveillance, but individual awareness is equally critical. Understanding how companies, governments, and criminals observe you — and what tools are available to limit that observation — is the first step toward reclaiming digital privacy in an AI-augmented world.