A cylinder sits in a room. It is impassive, smooth, simple and small. It stands 14.8cm high, with a single blue-green circular light that traces around its upper rim. It is silently attending. A woman walks into the room, carrying a sleeping child in her arms, and she addresses the cylinder.

Big tech companies create jobs, encourage innovation and provide valuable services free. Why would we want to break them up? Ms. Messer is a technology investor and entrepreneur.

This summer, the fifth anniversary of Edward Snowden’s revelations about NSA surveillance passed quietly, adrift on a tide of news that now daily sweeps the ground from under our feet.

A barista gets burned at work, buys first-aid cream at Target, and later that day sees a Facebook ad for the same product. In another Target, someone shouts down the aisle to a companion to pick up some Red Bull; on the ride home, Instagram serves a sponsored post for the beverage.

If you live in a major metropolitan area, the odds are good you’re being watched and listened to at all times. And even if you don’t, that surveillance technology is still there—in stores, on cop cars, in schools and stop lights.

Netflix believes, algorithmically at least, that I am the kind of person who likes to watch “Dark TV Shows Featuring a Strong Female Lead.” This picksome genre is never one that I that seek out intentionally, and I’m not sure it even represents my viewing habits.

The parallel between Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon and CCTV may be clear, but what happens when you step into the world of data capture? The philosopher Jeremy Bentham famously requested in his will that his body be dissected and put on public display.

Computer algorithms have gotten much better at recognizing patterns, like specific animals or people's faces, allowing software to automatically categorize large image collections. But we've come to rely on some things that computers can't do well.

The parallel between Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon and CCTV may be clear, but what happens when you step into the world of data capture? The philosopher Jeremy Bentham famously requested in his will that his body be dissected and put on public display.

Janet Vertesi, assistant professor of sociology at Princeton University, had an idea: would it be possible to hide her pregnancy from big data? Thinking about technology—the way we use it and the way it uses us—is her professional life’s work.

In case you didn’t already feel like Google was a creepy stalker, its artificial intelligence tools are rapidly crossing over into uncanny. The latest one is PlaNet, a new deep-learning machine that specializes in figuring out where a photo was taken—using nothing but the image’s pixels.

Google knows the questions that people wouldn’t dare ask aloud, and it silently offers reams of answers. But it is a mistake to think of a search engine as an oracle for anonymous queries. It isn’t. Not even close.

Criminal investigations often use photographic evidence to identify suspects. Here we combined robust face perception and high-resolution photography to mine face photographs for hidden information.

Editor's note: This is the eighth installment of the Living With Data series exploring how our online data is tracked, collected and used.

Every day a piece of computer code is sent to me by e-mail from a website to which I subscribe called IFTTT. Those letters stand for the phrase “if this then that,” and the code is in the form of a “recipe” that has the power to animate it.

Anthropologist danah boyd (uncapitalization hers) is the author of It's Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens (Yale University Press). In May, she told reason three ways kids find privacy online. 1. Social steganography.

After a misleading tip linked Hasan Elahi to terrorist activities - and an FBI investigation - the artist created a project that lets anyone monitor him. But how much is he really revealing? I share just about every moment of my life.

This essay was commissioned by Anne Hilde Neset for Only Connect Festival Of Sound 2014: J.G. Ballard. It was published in the Only Connect catalogue, May 2014. Thank you to NyMusikk and Only Connect for permission to republish it here.

Google received 12,000 requests from people seeking to be "forgotten" by the world's leading search engine on the first day it offered the service, a company spokesman in Germany said Saturday.

A data haven is "the information equivalent to a tax haven," a country that helps you evade other countries' rules on what you can and can't do with your bits. (Think "Swiss banking" for data.) The best-known example comes from Neal Stephenson's 1999 best-seller Cryptonomicon, whose heroes go up against murderous warlords, rapacious venture capitalists, and epic authorial digressions in their quest to bring untraceable communications to the masses and get rich in the process.