Agentic AI spells the end of privacy

Unfortunately, users were and still are relentlessly tracked wherever they go online, as they became commodities or numbers for a marketing target. Technology began to nibble away at users’ privacy. I didn’t realize then that this was only the beginning of the end. As AI becomes woven into the fabric of our lives, it’s beginning to be like living in a goldfish bowl. Can we possibly hold on to our much cherished personal privacy in this new world?

Questions on privacy and how it is that one’s phone magically knows what we talked about or searched, and the next minute begins popping up relevant ads, are still the most common that I get. If users are still baffled by being tracked, imagine the shock when agentic AI becomes embedded in the apps we use most. To autonomously take on your tedious tasks, AI needs access and can hardly remain hands-off. Companies are well aware of the risks, but that hasn’t stopped the race to make agentic AI work and personalize your experiences.

It’s no longer just about tracking where we go: it’s about an agent having the keys to our past to predict our future, leaving many to wonder if we are inviting a permanent, invisible entity into our most personal conversations.

The promise of privacy by design for Meta’s smart glasses was shattered when it was found that while users believed their AI interactions were private, raw footage from bedrooms and bathrooms was being beamed to data annotators in Nairobi, Kenya. Workers described a system in which they reviewed thousands of unfiltered clips weekly, seeing people undressing, using the toilet, or handling sensitive bank details, because the automatic blurring filters failed to hide the most intimate moments.

In one horrifying account, an annotator recalled watching a woman change clothes, completely unaware that her bedside-table glasses were acting as a live window for a stranger halfway across the world. The result was that in March 2026, a class-action lawsuit was filed against Meta, accusing the company of deceptive advertising, arguing that features meant to identify objects essentially turned users into involuntary fodder for AI training.

Beyond the wearers, the chilling effect has extended to the public, where bad actors have reportedly used the glasses to secretly film and harass bystanders by scraping personal data from the live feed.

In our modern digital environment, we have moved past the era of being tracked by simple web tools—we now live in a world where our most unguarded moments are harvested as data sets, proving that, in the race for smarter AI, the first thing we sacrificed was the right to privacy.

For now, all you can do is dive deep into the settings for the technology you use and turn off whatever you think allows companies to opt you in or out and grant them access. One can only hope that better sense prevails and that laws develop to safeguard our private moments.

The New Normal: The world is at an inflexion point. Artificial intelligence (AI) is set to be as massive a revolution as the Internet has been. The option to just stay away from AI will not be available to most people, as all the tech we use takes the AI route. This column series introduces AI to the non-techie in an easy and relatable way, aiming to demystify and help a user to actually put the technology to good use in everyday life.

Mala Bhargava is most often described as a ‘veteran’ writer who has contributed to several publications in India since 1995. Her domain is personal tech, and she writes to simplify and demystify technology for a non-techie audience.