When Mark Zuckerberg posted a picture of himself on Facebook in June, a sharp-eyed observer spotted a piece of tape covering his laptop's camera. The irony didn't go unnoticed: A man whose $350 billion company relies on users feeding it intimate details about their lives is worried about his own privacy. But Zuckerberg is smart to take precautions.
    Many of the cameras that can be pointed at us today are easy to spot. But researchers are developing recording devices that can hide in plain sight, some by mimicking animals. A company called AeroVironment has produced a drone that looks and flies like a humming bird. Engineers at Carnegie Mellon, NASA, and elsewhere have designed "snakebots" that can maneuver in tight spaces and could be adapted for surveillance. Robotic bugs are in development, too, and engineers at UC Berkeley and in Singapore are developing cyborg beetles—real insects that can be remote-controlled via implanted electrodes and that might someday pack cameras.
    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 user's 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.
    As the data collected by all the devices around us become overwhelming, we'll increasingly rely on artificial intelligence to sift through them and make decisions, says Gary T. Marx, the author of <em>Windows into the Soul: Surveillance and Society in an Age of High Technology</em>. Algorithms are already used to identify potential terrorists, as well as to generate credit ratings and parole recommendations. Chicago police use an algorithm that analyzes arrest records, social networks, and other data to identify future criminals. Soon, bots will likely guide many aspects of personnel management, such as hiring and faring.  The word "sharp-eyed" in the first sentence of Paragraph One surely means ______.