It’s also why we should be skeptical of Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement that Facebook will become a more “privacy-focused platform” that emphasizes features like ephemeral, expiring information. Truly ephemeral communications are certainly obscure, but it’s unclear what information Facebook will scrub on the front end (for users) and the back end (from the company). The company’s history suggests we shouldn’t let our guard down.

Obscurity is also a better way to understand Europe’s “right to be forgotten” law, which can’t make anyone forget anything, but can make the remnants of your awkward youth harder to find online.

Finally, consider cognitive limitations. Facial recognition technology poses an immense danger to society because it can be used to overcome biological constraints on how many individuals anyone can recognize in real time. If its use continues to grow and the right regulations aren’t instituted, we might lose the ability to go out in public without being recognized by the police, our neighbors and corporations.

Creating strong regulations for the technology is going to be an uphill battle, especially because it’s already become widespread, being deployed at airports to make boarding easier and adopted by schools to increase safety. It is even being used at summer camps so parents can automatically receive photos in which their children appear.

Threats to our obscurity are growing because technology is making our personal information easy and cheap to aggregate, archive and interpret — with substantial growth in predictive analytics, too. To see what we mean, just look yourself up on the website MyLife and marvel at how much information has been cobbled together from different moments in your life for anyone to see at the click of a button. Even speaking in hushed tones to a friend at a crowded cafe might not be enough to protect your obscurity if cameras are someday equipped with lip-reading artificial intelligence software.

Obscurity is vital to our well-being for several reasons. It gives us breathing room to go about our daily routines with little fear of being judged, sent unwanted ads, gossiped about or needlessly shamed.

[As technology advances, will it continue to blur the lines between public and private? Sign up for Charlie Warzel’s limited-run newsletter to explore what’s at stake and what you can do about it.]