No One to Blame but Us

Once upon a time, “privacy” meant shutting the door, closing the windows, and maybe drawing the curtain. These days, even if you lock yourself inside your house, your phone still knows how many steps you took, which movie you watched, and when you had your last cup of chai.

We like to blame gadgets, apps, and now even AI for killing privacy. But honestly, we didn’t lose it—it’s we who gave it away happily. We clicked “Accept All” faster than we blink.

In his book The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg tells one of the earliest and funniest examples of this modern surveillance story. In the early 2000s—long before social media—Target, a big American supermarket chain, decided to study its customers’ shopping habits. A data expert named Andrew Pole was asked “to build mathematical models that could crawl through data and determine which households contained kids and which were dedicated bachelors; which shoppers loved the outdoors and who was more interested in ice cream and romance novels.”[1]

Basically, he had to become a mathematical astrologer—predicting your life from your shopping cart.

Soon the team went one step further: to find out which customers were pregnant. Why? Because, as Duhigg says, “figuring out who was pregnant could make Target millions of dollars.”[2]

So, if a woman suddenly stopped buying scented soap and started buying cotton balls, the computer assumed she was expecting. And then, boom—coupons for baby cribs and nappies started arriving! One angry father even scolded the store for sending maternity ads to his teenage daughter—until he found out that Target’s computer was right and he was not.

Pole later admitted that “hiding what you know is sometimes as important as knowing it,” because “not all women are enthusiastic about a computer program scrutinizing their reproductive plans.”[3] In his own words: “Not everyone, it turns out, thinks mathematical mind reading is cool.”[4]

By then, Target had already built a Guest ID for every customer—complete with their income, neighbourhood, marital status, favourite magazines, credit card details, and websites visited.[5] Other companies joined in too, selling information about “political leanings, reading habits, charitable giving,” and even whether someone was “fat or bald.”[6]

One expert calmly said, “It used to be that companies only knew what their customers wanted them to know. That world is far behind us.”[7]

And what did we do? We nodded and said, “Okay, but the discounts are good.”

Now, we carry our tattletales right in our pockets. Our phones, watches, and even refrigerators gossip about us all day long. And then we complain that AI is spying on us—while asking it to crack jokes, translate songs, edit articles like this, make hilarious cartoons to promote them, and even remind us to drink water.

The truth is, no one stole our privacy. We sold it—for convenience, free apps, and Wi-Fi at coffee shops.

So yes, there’s no more privacy. But at least we have smart TVs that call us by name and shopping apps that know when we’re sad and need ice cream. Maybe that’s not freedom—but it surely comes with free delivery.

Hyderabad, October 4, 2025

Notes

1. Charles Duhigg, The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do and How to Change It (London: Random House, 2013 [2012]), p. 184.
2. Ibid., p. 184.
3. Ibid., p. 184.
4. Ibid., p. 184.
5. Ibid., pp. 187–188.
6. Ibid., p. 188.
7. Ibid., p. 188.