It was one of the few moments that left Mark Zuckerberg speechless: during his joint hearing before the Senate’s Judiciary and Commerce Committees last week, Senator Dick Durbin asked the Facebook C.E.O., “Would you be comfortable sharing with us the name of the hotel you stayed in last night?” Zuckerberg paused, his face working furiously, eventually settling into a grin as he replied, “No.” Bystanders laughed, but Durbin pressed on. “I think that may be what this is all about,” he said. “Your right to privacy, the limits of your right to privacy, and how much you give away in modern America.”

As it turns out, we’ve been giving away quite a lot. When I signed up for Facebook in 2006, I was initially alarmed by the site’s requirement that I use my full, real name—a novel stipulation after years of anonymous Myspace and AOL Instant Messenger screen names. With time, however, Facebook’s requests for ever more detailed information about me began to feel commonplace; I could “like” pages aligned with my interests, input my favorite quotes, TV shows, and movies, and detail biographical information identifying my family members and a timeline of life events, sharing that data with Facebook and its advertisers all the while. Each new data breach—Yahoo, Equifax, Uber, and now Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica leak, which sold out as many as 87 million people—has set off alarm bells, yet we continue to readily engage with free platforms that make our lives easier. As technology evolves, however, our complacency is poised to leave us more exposed than ever before.

“Cambridge Analytica is just the tip of the iceberg, and this problem doesn’t begin and end with Facebook,” Evan Greer, the campaign director for the Internet activism group Fight for the Future, told me when I asked about last week’s media circus. “It’s not even just big tech companies; retail chains, hospitals, and government agencies are vacuuming up massive amounts of sensitive personal information about all of us. We’re seeing now how that data can be used not just to invade our privacy, but to manipulate how we think.” Indeed, as Washington struggles to stay abreast of new developments, Silicon Valley is already racing ahead, developing ways to implement user data that haven’t so much as occurred to lawmakers. Both Amazon and Google have reportedly filed patent applications that could allow an Amazon “voice sniffer algorithm” to be used in electronic devices, to analyze audio almost instantly when a device hears words like “dislike,” “bought,” or “love.” When the device identifies key words you say, it can store or transmit them to advertisers, who can then use those words to customize ads for you.

Slack, a workplace communication company, is purportedly taking the first steps in developing a tool that gauges how people’s communication style changes based on who they’re talking to (it’s being sold as a tool to suss out “mansplaining”)—the tool would collect extensive data on communication patterns and other personal tics. Such a deep dive may seem alarming, but depending on the Slack plan your company has purchased, your boss may already have access to your personal data. “We’re a bit stuck in the middle on these conversations about access to information,” Slack C.E.O. Stewart Butterfield told Quartz. “Most of our large corporate customers have employee provisions which already grant them the right to access all employee communications.”

The Indian government, meanwhile, is scanning the “fingerprints, eyes, and faces” of its 1.3 billion residents; to do things like receive welfare benefits and pensions, or to enter school competitions, Indians must now pass fingerprint or facial-recognition tests—a system that has alarmed privacy experts. Facebook’s experimentation with user data, too, goes far beyond allowing it to be siphoned by third-party apps. Earlier this month, CNBC reported that the company has been working on a secret project asking hospitals to share anonymized patient data, with the goal of blending hospital data with social data, and a confidential document reviewed by the Intercept shows that Facebook employs artificial intelligence to predict users’ future movements for advertisers. “This isn’t Facebook showing you Chevy ads because you’ve been reading about Ford all week,” writes Sam Biddle. “Rather Facebook [is] using facts of your life to predict that in the near future, you’re going to get sick of your car. Facebook’s name for this service: ‘loyalty prediction.’”