From privacy to spam walls

On the street, flocks of eye-in-the-sky microdrones will soon make CCTV seem as antiquated as the ’90s surveillance thriller Sliver. The FBI is launching a U.S.-wide facial recognition program in 2014. Every Google Glass can covertly record faces and places. Soon there will be nowhere you won’t be tracked.

A PEW Research Center study found that half of American consumers don’t care about electronic surveillance. The other half (unsurprisingly) does.

This represents the potential for a new mass consumer market and a newly elusive target audience.

Technology company Parrot sells consumer 'Drone Quadcopters' for a few hundred dollars that stream and record HD video of the ground below to your smartphone, letting you record and review simultaneously.

On the flip side, New York artist Adam Harvey recently unveiled a concept he calls 'Stealth Wear' – clothing that uses reflective fabrics to dazzle surveillance, hinting at a new kind of fashion statement.

The security concerns of hacker elites are suddenly ripe for being sold to the masses, both on and offline. But online advertisers often rely on web users’ blasé attitudes toward privacy, using cookies to create and target segments.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights activist group, has long espoused using pretty good privacy (PGP) encryption and Tor (anonymous routing) to protect your digital life from prying eyes. This is technically beyond the majority of casual web consumers, who are looking for more user-friendly solutions.

So Microsoft recently leveraged these security concerns to reposition its much maligned Internet Explorer, which, in its latest release, defaults to preventing tracking cookies, causing controversy among digital display advertisers increasingly hooked on targeting.

Potentially even more disruptive to the multi-billion dollar online advertising industry, a graduate student in Singapore created a game called Vortex that lets you destroy and re-create your own browser cookies, making your online profile useless by filling it with misinformation.

The next big thing in consumer culture isn’t privacy: it’s personal spam. As we move forward, more consumers will create a cacophony of noise to drown out their real signals.

Brands that want access to this stealthy set of consumers and their data are going to need to find new and smarter ways to earn their attention and information.

Faris Yakob is founder and principal at Genius Steals LLC and the co-author of  The Digital State: How the Internet Changes Nearly Everything. Read more from Faris in our Clubhouse.