There’s been a lot of talk about privacy in recent years, especially from tech companies “committed to data privacy.” It almost seems like a silly nomenclature of corporate talk because the idea of a private life is all but gone.

“What have you been up to?” is a question now given out of politeness instead of curiosity.

It was the privacy of someone’s thoughts that pulled our interest, hoping to tug at a few strands to see what was going on. And where it would get interesting is if we didn’t know, we would speculate—or gossip.

And while we pretend to have a semblance of privacy by either not participating in grand social schemes, or carefully curating what we show, nothing is private from the endless computer systems mining every bit of data about us.

This isn’t to say a golden age has passed us by (far from it), and there are many advantages to predictive behaviour analysis (“Why yes, I do want tacos tonight!”), but what’s lost is that sometimes, we just want to privately participate in what’s happening with our own life.

Other times, we just want to tell a story without having someone already know how it’s going to end.

For me, I want to feel like my ten year old self wandering through the stacks of books at the library, ending up in random sections and picking up random books: the biography of James Naismith, a strategy guide for Monopoly, how to do simple magic tricks.

Nobody knew who I was and nobody could tell me what I was going to like. I just got to wander and choose.

I don’t know what world we will enter into in this next decade, but that is something I’m going to miss.