Brett Gaylor is creator and director of the show that reveals how we are being followed online by a host of companies

“I know right now that this is the country you live in,” says a seemingly omnipotent narrator as an image of the Queen flashes up on my screen. “I know that it is a nice morning. I know that you’re on a Mac.”

I’m watching the first episode of Do Not Track – and it’s a discombobulating experience. An online interactive documentary, the show aims to reveal how you, yes you, are being followed online by a host of companies. And it’s personal. Both the narrator’s identity and language are determined by your location, deduced from your IP address, while data gleaned by inviting you to log on to Facebook, take a survey or enter the address of an oft-visited website reveal how trackers deduce not only who you are and what you like, but use that information to shape your online world.

“Each viewer is going to have a different experience as they watch it,” explains the series’ creator and director Brett Gaylor. “Privacy is a very complex issue and it can be abstract for people so we wanted to explore ways that we could have that hit home – literally.”

Featuring experts ranging from danah boyd (she spells her name without capitals), founder of the Data & Society Research Institute in New York, to internet activist Ethan Zuckerman, the documentary sheds light on what’s going on behind the screens of desktop and mobile devices.

“[People] may not know how their phone tracks them as they move around a city,” says Gaylor. “They may not know the particulars of how an advertising network works.” But this is no exercise in scaremongering. Rather, he hopes the series, and the panoply of resources that accompany it, will stir viewers to consider their privacy options. “The Snowden revelations really opened people’s eyes and we want to give people a way to dig a little deeper and also to be able to take some action as consumers,” he says.

An international collaboration, the documentary’s first two episodes are set to launch on Tuesday (14 April) at donottrack-doc.com, while a further five will be released subsequently – one every two weeks. The project will also be presented as an interactive installation in the Storyscapes section of the Tribeca Film Festival which starts on 16 April in Lower Manhattan. Visitors will be able to take their devices along for expert advice on how to make them more secure.

Ultimately Gaylor hopes the project will encourage viewers to consider not only their online privacy, but that of others too. “It is not about having something to hide,” he says. “It is about having a right to privacy and the social norm that it is OK to be private.”