Although I may have painted a somewhat bleak picture of the current state of affairs in places, we are not irrevocably set on a track toward a dystopian future, where surveillance is rife and privacy feels like a far‐removed concept rather than being the reality of how we live our lives.

We have a choice about whether we educate ourselves and contribute to a future where technology empowers us, or whether we fail to take action and allow technology to control us. There are steps all of us can take as individuals to improve our privacy and protect our human rights in a digital world. Businesses, too, can take measures to help build this free and equitable future.

Finally, governments need to recognise the vast possibilities that lie before us where technology is concerned and introduce policies that educate and empower, rather than seeking to dictate and control how we access and use technology in the future. In the coming chapters, I share details of the various steps, or countermeasures, we can take at various levels of society, starting with us as individuals, then exploring the corporate world, and finally looking at what governments and elected officials can do to help set us on the right path for the future.

I also invite you to think about the future we are building for the generations coming through behind us. What kind of world do we want them to live in? Technological developments that are expected in the next decade will mean that possibilities that once only existed in sci‐fi literature could become reality. Only by educating ourselves about technology and ensuring that the next generation is properly educated about how to code and program that technology to protect their own privacy and rights can we start to bring about the cultural shift necessary to set us on a trajectory toward a future that more closely resembles utopia than dystopia.