Cameras are seemingly all around us, nearly all the time. Cars are roving video camera platforms. Doorbells are cameras. Houses and storefronts are polka dotted with miniature cameras that catch sharp images of everything and everyone all around them. People walk around town with cameras on sticks, livestreaming on Twitch and Facebook.

Having your image recorded and put online, whether by choice, accidentally, or illegally, means that it will probably be gobbled up and saved by anyone who knows how to deploy an image scraping bot on the internet. This might be done by major search engines, internet archive webpages, academics, hobbyists, stalkers, private enterprises, or even state actors. Images of you, even incidentally captured, could be sold to data brokers and resold anywhere in the world.

Some people shrug at the thought of losing control over their image on the internet. But this attitude is too often the product of blissful ignorance, like Truman in the first act of the Truman Show.

Consider the recent joint investigation of Clearview AI, Inc. by the federal, Quebec, Alberta, and British Columbia privacy commissioners. This private US company scraped billions of images from search engines and social media sites for its own facial recognition database. Countless other companies or state actors could be doing the same thing without being discovered.

The technology that can turn your physical identity into a mathematical fingerprint is not just for well-funded technocrats. Take, for example, the existence of free and open-source software libraries that just about anyone can use to create machine learning facial recognition applications. There are similar libraries for analyzing and recognizing a person’s gait or other bodily movements.

These tools are the tip of the iceberg; they are early implementations of technology that is still developing at a blistering, and accelerating, pace.

Meanwhile, laws designed to preserve and protect our privacy languish in a bygone era. Copyright law is of little assistance. Unless you captured the image, you generally do not own any rights to it, even if it is an image of you.

There are privacy torts. But jurisdictional and enforcement problems, and the extreme cost and duration of litigation in Canada, make civil remedies impractical for most people.

Existing federal and provincial privacy laws that regulate the use of personal information in the private sector were simply not created to deal with the kinds of issues we face today. The federal government has been planning to replace the Personal Information Protection and Electronics Documents Act with a more modern “Digital Charter.” However, this bill was swept away by the 2021 election and has not been tabled in the current Parliament. Even if it is enacted, it will already be out of date. It will not be enough.

We must face the real possibility that the nature and scale of technology-related privacy problems have already exceeded the grasp of laws and governments.

If we wish to regain some measure of control of our own images, the first step is education and awareness. We must become more conscious about the fact that a day rarely passes without each of us being recorded in some way. Be aware that the data contained in images of you is extremely portable and replicable. Be aware that images of you can be more valuable and sought after than you might imagine — for uses you might not be able to anticipate or even imagine.

In time, societal norms about the appropriateness of indiscriminately recording or broadcasting everyone and everything may change. Consumer choices might push businesses to do more to protect our images. Privacy-preserving technology might even help us fight back.

But for now, “in case I don’t see you, good afternoon, good evening, and goodnight!”