If even an insect is too obvious, Kristofer Pister, an engineer at Berkeley, and David Blaauw, an engineer at the University of Michigan, are developing “smart dust” and “micro motes,” respectively: tiny computers mere millimeters wide that can be equipped with cameras and other sensors. One can (or can’t, as it were) see where this is going.

2 | Your Past Will Be Omnipresent

Imagine this: You walk into a car showroom and before you say anything, the dealer knows your name, employment status, car-buying history, and credit rating. Such a future isn’t far off, says Christopher Soghoian, the principal technologist at the ACLU.

Already, data brokers such as Acxiom and LexisNexis compile reams of information on all of us. Clients can purchase a dossier on your criminal, consumer, and marital past. Soghoian thinks it’s only a matter of time before data brokers begin drawing from online-dating profiles and social-media posts as well.

Right now, clients have to log in and search for people by name or buy lists of people with certain traits. But as facial-recognition technology becomes more widespread, Soghoian says, any device with a camera and the right software could automatically pull up your information. Eventually, someone might be able to point a phone at you (or look at you through smart contact lenses) and see a bubble over your head marking you as unemployed or recently divorced. We’ll no longer be able to separate our personae—our work selves from our weekend selves. Instead our histories will come bundled as a pop-up on strangers’ screens.

3 | We’ll Let Spies In

This January, a spate of news articles reported that a search engine called Shodan allows online voyeurs to browse password-unprotected baby monitors and watch strangers’ children sleeping in their cribs. This shouldn’t have come as a surprise: Unsecured webcams of all sorts are findable through various search engines, including Google. Still, the news was a reminder of how easy it is to spy on people through the gadgets in their homes—a problem that’s likely to grow as more devices are connected to the internet.

With the advent of the Internet of Things, appliances and gadgets will monitor many aspects of our lives, from what we eat to what we flush. Devices we talk to will record and upload our conversations, as Amazon’s Echo already does. Even toys will make us vulnerable. Kids say the darndest things, and the talking Hello Barbie doll sends those things wirelessly to a third-party server, where they are analyzed by speech-recognition software and shared with vendors.

Even our thoughts could become hackable. The technology company Retinad can use the sensors on virtual-reality headsets to track users’ engagement. Future devices might integrate EEG electrodes to measure brain waves. In August, Berkeley engineers announced that they had produced “neural dust,” implantable electrodes just a millimeter wide that can record brain activity for scientific or medical purposes.