Who holds the off switch?

It’s 7:42 on a Thursday morning in March 2035, and five people are buying the same flat white.

Lin is in Shenzhen. She glances at the little camera above the till, and the coffee is paid for before she picks up the cup. Sofie is in Lyon. She taps her phone, and her wallet app adds one line to a log that only she can read. Dana is in Phoenix, where the coffee app already knows the order because it’s the usual, and by lunchtime a mattress company knows Dana was up early. Priya is in Pune, scanning a QR code that’s been taped to the counter for years, and her consent app asks whether the café can keep her number. Amani is in Kisumu, paying with a phone he bought last month, the same week he got his first ID card. The phone and the ID both scanned his eyes.

Same coffee, same minute, five completely different answers to the one question I care about here: who gets to know?

Imagined · Thursday 15 March 2035, 07:42

The watched cityThe rulebookThe marketplaceThe public railsThe leapfrog

one flat white

• The cafégets: somea face match, approved
• The paymentgets: everythingeverything, under her real name
• The stategets: everythingwhatever it asks for
• The ad marketgets: somethe super app keeps it in-house
• Youcontrol: nothingcan't see who looked

Lin glances at the camera above the till in Shenzhen, and the coffee is paid before she picks up the cup.

The state holds the off switch.

I made those five people up, obviously. I didn’t make up the machinery. Every piece of it exists somewhere in 2026, and the rest of this post is me showing you where, then guessing out loud about where it goes.

Here’s my guess, up front. By 2035 a coffee gets recorded everywhere. What changes from place to place is who holds the off switch. In Shenzhen it’s the state. In Lyon it’s the law, which lends it to you. In Phoenix it’s whoever paid for the data. In Pune you hold it through a consent app, but on rails the government built and can take back. And in Kisumu it’s whoever built the phone and the ID, which is often a company on another continent.

Even my hit counter knows your city

Let me confess something first.

When I built this site, I wanted it to be boring about data. I wrote down every single thing it keeps about you, and it all fits on one page. Comments don’t ask for an email address. There are no cookies. The visitor stats run on Umami, on my own server, and your IP address is never stored.

And still, for every page you read here, my stats work out roughly which city you’re in.

I never set out to build a tracker. I set out to count page views, and the counter knows your city anyway, because that’s what the software does out of the box. Doesn’t that seem a little weird? Collecting is the default setting of almost everything now, even software written by people who are actively trying not to collect. So “will they collect it?” stopped being an interesting question years ago. The interesting question is who can make them stop.

That depends a lot on where you live. I think the world is sorting itself into five kinds of society, and the coffee looks different in each one.

The watched city: the state holds the switch

For most of history, the limit on surveillance was staff.

East Germany’s Stasi is the famous example. By the late 1980s it had about 91,000 full-time employees and about 189,000 unofficial informants, roughly one informant for every 90 people in the country. It left behind 111 kilometres of files. And it still couldn’t watch everyone, because watching takes people, and people get tired and go home.

China in 2026 doesn’t have that problem. Nobody knows exactly how many surveillance cameras it has, because China doesn’t publish a count, but the estimate Comparitech uses (taken from a 2024 US House document) is about 700 million. That’s roughly one camera for every two people. The rest of the world averages about six per thousand.

Now let me spoil a favorite scare story. The “social credit score” that rates every Chinese citizen and stops you boarding a train for jaywalking mostly doesn’t exist. Jeremy Daum at China Law Translate, who has spent years reading the actual documents, describes a patchwork aimed mainly at companies: compliance records, financial credit reports, and a court blacklist of people who ignored a judgment. The national platform holds 80.7 billion credit records on 180 million business entities. The flight and train bans come almost entirely from that court list of people who didn’t pay what a judge told them to pay.

The real story is quieter, and I think it matters more. In July 2025 China launched a national cyberspace ID, one government-issued identity you can use to log in to apps instead of your phone number. It’s voluntary. By September 2026 the Ministry of Public Security said 50 million people had one, and by July more than 530 apps and sites had signed up to accept it. That’s still a small slice of China’s internet users, and Daum argues it adds little the state couldn’t already do, since real-name registration has been the rule for years. Fair! But it’s plumbing, and plumbing tends to get used.

There are rules, too. Since June 2025, anyone in China who stores face data on 100,000 or more people has to register with the regulator, and face recognition is banned in hotel rooms and changing rooms. In public places it’s allowed where public security needs it, and public security decides what it needs.

The watched city is also for sale. When the Carnegie Endowment built its AI Global Surveillance Index in 2019, at least 75 of 176 countries were using AI surveillance, and Chinese companies supplied 63 of them. That’s still the newest independent count I could find.

Russia is building its own version in public. From September 2025, every phone and tablet sold in Russia had to come with a state-backed messenger called Max preinstalled, and from August of that year WhatsApp and Telegram calls were restricted. By June 2026, Mediascope ranked Max as the country’s most-used messenger, ahead of Telegram. People noticed, of course. In an April 2026 poll, 40% of Russians said they use a VPN, and 61% of those aged 18 to 29.

The most complete off switch is the one for the whole internet, and governments flip it a lot. Access Now counted 313 internet shutdowns in 52 countries in 2025, the most it has ever recorded. Iran set the record for length this year: 88 days without a working connection to the outside world, from 28 February to 26 May 2026. Throughout, a national intranet kept approved services running.

I think that intranet is the part to watch. A modern shutdown can leave the state’s own services humming along and switch off everyone else.

Internet shutdowns recorded per year

So here’s my guess for the watched city in 2035. The camera stops being the scary part. A camera was only ever as scary as the person watching its feed, and that person was the Stasi’s bottleneck. Now the person is software, and software doesn’t get tired, doesn’t go home, and costs about the same whether it watches a thousand people or a hundred million. The staff limit is gone. What’s left is one ID that every login, payment and train ticket hangs off, and a state that can look at any of it whenever it wants.

And Lin will probably like it, most days. Paying with your face is fast. In the first half of 2026, 439,321 travellers walked through a corridor at Dubai’s airports that recognized their faces, no passport needed, and I’d bet most of them loved it. That’s the uncomfortable part of the watched city: much of it gets sold, and happily bought, as convenience.

The rulebook: the law holds the switch, and lends it to you

Europe’s answer was to write it all down.

The GDPR has applied since May 2018, and by January 2026 European regulators had handed out about €7.1 billion in fines under it, according to DLA Piper’s annual survey. The record is still Meta’s €1.2 billion from 2023. TikTok got €530 million in 2025, and Google €403 million just last month. (A Luxembourg court annulled Amazon’s €746 million fine in March, so that total is a little generous.)

GDPR fines since May 2018, running total in € billions

For most people, though, the most visible result of the world’s best-known privacy law is a pop-up they click without reading. I hit “Reject all” so often that my thumb does it before the page has finished loading. A law that set out to give people control mostly gave them a chore.

The EU kept writing. The AI Act has banned social scoring and a handful of other uses since February 2025, though in July 2026 a “Digital Omnibus” pushed most of the rules for high-risk AI back from August 2026 to December 2027. And Sofie’s wallet is an actual plan: EU law says every member state has to offer its citizens a digital identity wallet by the end of 2026. As of mid-October, a tracker run by eID Easy counted zero wallets in full production, five countries with public test versions, and Germany launching on 2 January 2027. Two days late. I’ve shipped like that.

Now, rulebooks cut both ways, and this is where I get nervous. The same law that keeps companies out of your coffee can hand the state a key.

For four years the EU has argued about “Chat Control”, a plan to scan private messages for child abuse material. Member states dropped mandatory scanning from their position in November 2025, but whether private messages get scanned under the permanent law is still undecided, and the next round of talks is in December.

The UK shows how fast this can move. Age checks under the Online Safety Act started on 25 July 2025, and Proton VPN said its UK sign-ups jumped more than 1,400% (Ofcom put daily VPN users at about 1.5 million at the peak). Earlier that year, Apple pulled Advanced Data Protection, its end-to-end encryption for iCloud, from UK users rather than build the access the government had demanded, and in 2026 it’s back at the Investigatory Powers Tribunal fighting a second order. The UK also announced a digital ID in September 2025 that would be mandatory for right-to-work checks, then dropped the mandatory part in January 2026.

Switzerland did the most Swiss thing possible and put its e-ID to a referendum. It passed in September 2025 with 50.39% of the vote. By a whisker!

My guess for the rulebook in 2035: companies stay on a short leash, and Sofie really can see and revoke every line in her log. But I’d bet the state ends up holding more switches than it does today, mostly through age checks and ID requirements, all of it passed with the best intentions and surprisingly little argument. That’s the version of Europe I worry about.

The marketplace: whoever paid holds the switch

In the US, your data is mostly a product, and products get sold.

There’s still no federal privacy law. The last big attempt, the American Privacy Rights Act, died in 2024, and the newest bill, from April 2026, would override the state laws instead of adding to them. So the states filled the gap. By the IAPP’s count, 23 now have a comprehensive consumer privacy law, after a quiet 2025 and four new ones this year.

1. 12018
2. 12019
3. 12020
4. 32021
5. 52022
6. 122023
7. 192024
8. 192025
9. 232026

Americans can tell. In Pew’s 2023 survey, 73% said they had little or no control over what companies do with their data, and 79% said the same about the government. Pew hasn’t asked those exact questions since, but in February 2026, 71% told it that AI will make their personal information less secure.

Then there are the brokers. By June 2026, 581 data brokers had registered with California, a record. California’s answer is DROP, a single page where you can tell every registered broker to delete you at once. It opened in January 2026, more than 325,000 Californians had signed up by July, and since August the brokers have had to process those requests every 45 days. I love this idea. I want one where I live!

The one that still makes my stomach turn is 23andMe. Who decides what happens to your DNA when the company holding it goes bust? A bankruptcy court, it turns out. When 23andMe went under in 2025, the genetic data of its 15 million customers was part of what got sold, and a nonprofit led by its co-founder, Anne Wojcicki, bought the company for $305 million. About 1.9 million customers had deleted their data by June. Most people’s DNA went with the rest of the assets.

And the state shops here too. Flock Safety’s licence-plate cameras are in more than 6,000 US communities, by the company’s own count. In May 2025, 404 Media found more than 4,000 police searches in Flock’s system made for ICE or for immigration reasons, and more than 50 cities have cancelled or turned down Flock contracts in 2026. Clearview AI, which scraped faces off the public web to build a search engine for police, now claims more than 100 billion images.

All of it sits on top of the biggest advertising machine ever built: Meta and Google made about $490 billion from ads between them in 2025. When Apple started asking iPhone users whether each app could track them, most people said no, and only about 38% opt in, according to Adjust’s numbers for early 2026. Given an actual switch, people flip it.

The twist I keep coming back to is that in the marketplace, privacy is ALSO a product. Apple sells it as a feature, and you can pay a service to ask data brokers to delete you. Meta even tried it in Europe, charging people who didn’t want personalised ads (€5.99 a month on the web after a price cut in November 2024), and in April 2025 the European Commission fined Meta €200 million under the Digital Markets Act over that “pay or consent” model.

My guess for 2035 is that this becomes the American shape of privacy: a tier. You get the usual unless you pay for something better, the way you pay to skip the ads on a streaming service. Dana could switch it off. Dana would just have to pay.

The public rails: the state builds the road, and everyone drives on it

Back to Priya’s QR code for a second, because it’s my favorite piece of infrastructure on the planet.

India has issued 1.45 billion Aadhaar numbers, a digital ID for almost everyone in the country, and it built a payment system called UPI that any bank or app can plug into. The government owns the road, and anyone can build a car to drive on it. In the 2017-18 financial year, UPI’s first full one, it handled 0.92 billion transactions. In September 2026 it handled 24.07 billion. In one month!

UPI transactions per year, in billions

Brazil did the same thing for payments. Its central bank launched Pix in November 2020, and in 2025, 148 million people (about 86% of adults) sent or received a Pix. In September 2026 it carried 7.17 billion transactions. It works so well that in July 2025 the US Trade Representative opened an investigation into Brazil’s trade practices, payments included, and in June 2026 it concluded that Brazil favors its “national champion” in electronic payments. When a superpower picks a trade fight with your free payment app, I’d say the app works.

Estonia is the small, extreme version. Since divorce went online in December 2024, the government says all of its state services can be done digitally. (A divorce still needs one meeting with an official in person, which honestly seems fair.) X-Road, the layer its government systems use to talk to each other, handled 3.87 billion requests in the six months from December 2025 to May 2026, in a country of about 1.4 million people.

The privacy idea in the public-rails model is consent as plumbing. India’s data protection rules, notified in November 2025, create registered “consent managers”: companies whose whole job is to let you give, track and withdraw consent across services. They can start operating on 13 November 2026, three weeks from now, and most of the other obligations on companies (notices, security, breach reporting, children’s data) arrive in May 2027. Priya’s consent app is that idea, a few years on.

And now the weak point. The rails belong to the state, and states have other moods. India, the poster child for public rails, ran 65 internet shutdowns in 2025, second only to Myanmar.

My guess: by 2035 this is the model more people live under than any other, because it’s cheap, it works, and it lets a country skip a decade of plumbing. Its weak point is also its strength. The state built the rails, so the switch stays with you only for as long as the people running them want it to.

The leapfrog: your first ID might be your eyes

Now go back to Amani in Kisumu.

The ITU says 2.2 billion people were still offline in 2025, and that number is falling by well over a hundred million a year. The World Bank estimates that about 800 million people have no official ID at all, and that at least 2.8 billion don’t have one they can use online.

onlinenot online yetone dot = 100 million people

That’s a lot of people meeting the digital world for the first time, all at once, and plenty of companies would like to be the ones who say hello. The most famous is World (it used to be called Worldcoin), co-founded by Sam Altman. It scans your iris with a shiny chrome orb and gives you an ID that proves you’re a human and not a bot. By July 2026, more than 18 million people had been verified by an orb.

Then the regulators showed up. In May 2025, Kenya’s High Court ordered World to delete the iris data it had collected in Kenya, and the country’s data regulator confirmed the deletion in January 2026. Indonesia suspended World that same month, Colombia ordered its scanning shut down, and Thailand ordered 1.2 million records deleted.

I find that hopeful. 44 of the African Union’s 54 member states now have data protection laws, by a count from Strathmore University’s CIPIT, and 37 have a working regulator. The leapfrog countries are writing their privacy laws while the orbs are already in the shopping mall.

My guess for the leapfrog in 2035: the next billion people come online in one step, with a cheap phone, an AI assistant, and a biometric ID all arriving the same month. Whose rules they live under depends less on their own parliament than on who sold the phone and who built the ID system. Some of these countries will end up with rulebooks, because their courts are already acting like it. Others will import a watched city, camera by camera, from whoever offers the best financing.

Where the five are heading

Put all five on one chart and you get something like this. Across is who holds most of the data about you. Up is how much say you have over it.

2026, my reading2035, my guess

Notice that almost every arrow drifts left. That’s my real prediction, and it isn’t a happy one. Companies collected most of the data in the 2010s, and governments spent the 2020s working out that they could get at it, by buying it, regulating it, or building the rails themselves. By 2035 I expect the state to be in the middle of the coffee almost everywhere, in the friendly versions as well as the scary ones.

What the privacy business sells in 2035

There’s one more character in the coffee story I haven’t mentioned, and I think it’s the one that matters most. By 2035, most of those five people won’t order the coffee themselves. An assistant will.

ChatGPT alone had 900 million weekly users in February 2026, and reportedly passed a billion later in the year. People tell these things everything: health worries, money trouble, the fight they had last night, the stuff they’d never type into a search box. Those conversations aren’t as private as they feel. In July 2025 Sam Altman himself pointed out that a ChatGPT “therapy” chat has no legal confidentiality and could be produced in court. That wasn’t hypothetical, either. In May 2025 a judge in the New York Times’ lawsuit against OpenAI ordered it to keep all ChatGPT output logs, even deleted ones, until that order was lifted in late September, and in January 2026 a judge upheld handing 20 million de-identified chat logs to the other side.

By 2035 I think your assistant will know more about you than your search history, your bank and your phone’s location history put together. So who holds the off switch for that?

Here are my five guesses for what the privacy business sells by then.

The cookie banner dies. Consent moves into a setting you choose once, in your browser or your wallet, and sites have to respect it. Sofie’s log is that idea, grown up. I’ll miss the banners about as much as I miss fax machines.

You prove your age without showing your ID. Age checks went mainstream fast. Yoti, one of the bigger providers, passed a billion of them in November 2025. Australia banned under-16s from social media on 10 December 2025, and more than 5 million accounts had been removed or restricted by June 2026. (Three months in, an eSafety survey found that more than 81% of under-16s were still using a platform they’d been banned from. Teenagers remain undefeated.) Today most age checks mean handing over a face scan or a photo of your ID. I think the rulebook societies move to proofs that say “over 18” and nothing else. In the watched city, nobody bothers, because an age check there is just an ID check.

Your assistant becomes the biggest data broker you’ve ever met. It’ll know your health, your habits and your calendar, and it’ll negotiate with other people’s assistants on your behalf. The regulators have noticed. This month the UK’s ICO said it had made enquiries with OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta about how their AI agents were tested and deployed, and it has asked for evidence on agents until 20 November. My guess is that before 2030 some country passes an “assistant privilege”, legal confidentiality for what you tell your AI, the way you get it with a doctor or a lawyer. I’d bet on a rulebook country going first.

Privacy becomes a price tier. Meta’s €5.99 a month was the prototype. In the marketplace, “no tracking” turns into a checkbox on every subscription, priced like extra storage.

On your device becomes the premium model. Apple built Private Cloud Compute in 2024 so that AI requests too big for the phone run on servers that, Apple says, even Apple can’t read. Google announced its own version, Private AI Compute, in November 2025. When two companies that size start competing on “we can’t see your data”, you’ve got a market, and by 2035 I expect “runs privately” to be the thing you pay extra for.

Sold in 2026Sold in 2035, my guess

1. In 2026: Cookie banners you click through→By 2035: A browser or wallet setting that says no for you, everywhere
2. In 2026: Upload a photo of your ID→By 2035: Prove you're over 18 without showing anything else
3. In 2026: Data brokers who buy and resell you→By 2035: Consent apps you pay, or that pay you
4. In 2026: Chatbots that keep your history in the cloud→By 2035: Assistants that run on your own device, sold as the premium model
5. In 2026: Free apps paid for by ads→By 2035: A "no tracking" tier on every subscription
6. In 2026: VPNs=In 2035, still: VPNs

Back to the coffee

So, five coffees in 2035. Lin’s is the fastest. Sofie’s comes with the most paperwork, though she never sees any of it. Dana’s comes with a mattress ad. Priya’s comes with a question, and Amani’s came with an eye scan.

None of them gets a coffee nobody knows about. I don’t think that option survives to 2035 anywhere, and I’m not sure it survives to 2030. What you can still choose, a little, is which switch you’re near and who’s holding it. Mostly that gets decided by laws, defaults and boring settings screens that nobody opens.

So open one tonight. Go into your phone’s settings, look at which apps can see your location right now, and switch off the one you forgot you ever said yes to. That switch, at least, is yours.

Which of the five do you live in? And which one do you think you’ll be living in by 2035? Tell me in the comments. (No email address needed. I checked.)

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