CONCEPT OF PRIVACY SEEMS DOOMED TO BE A QUAINT RELIC

I had a business meeting with someone recently and casually mentioned I was a bit messy.

I know, she said without any embarrassment, “I Googled you before coming.”

I wasn’t that surprised, because I had Googled her, too. We live in a transparent era, where we know more about people before meeting them than we used to know when we married them.

Welcome to the overinformation age, where there are few secrets and armies of electronic spies.

Facebook knows what you like and dislike, who your friends are and what they like. Google knows what you Google, ogle, email and order online for dinner. Then they sell it to others, because you clicked on “I AGREE” to a 50-page document you didn’t have your team of lawyers read.

Your TV isn’t the “idiot box” of childhood now that it’s a Smart TV tracking your favourite shows, channels and music tastes to send off to advertisers.

It gets more up-close and personal. In recent years, more than 150 million personal fitness trackers are recording our footsteps walked, calories burned, hours slept, breaths taken and heartbeats pounded — and often sharing them with the manufacturers.

They know your heart’s condition better than you do; in the U.S., they can sell that info to your health insurance provider because, yes, you AGREED when you downloaded their program.

Then there’s your cellphone, an in-pocket spy that rats on your location all day, like a detective hired to tail you. Lately, when you use your phone’s nifty new voicerecognition apps, it also records you, then relays whatever you say to a server somewhere or other to do something or other, someday or other.

“Hey Siri!,” I said to my phone yesterday. “Are you recording me, Siri?”

She replied (this is verbatim): “I don’t know what that means, Josh, but I can search the web for “Are you recording me, Siri?”

“Sure, Siri,” I said, “and did you just record that?”

Siri replied: “I’m sorry, Josh. I’m afraid I can’t answer that.”

The latest spies in your home are working for the Internet of Eavesdropping Things: everything from your voice-recognition smart-fridge to your Internetlinked thermostat/lighting system — which knows exactly when you turn up your bedroom’s heat and dim the lights.

Someday your voice-recognition fridge may testify against you about a bank robbery you plotted in your kitchen, while it was silently recording.

It gets even more personal. Japanese Smart toilets have been hacked and remotely controlled by strangers who flushed them repeatedly and flipped the toilet seats. Meanwhile, a wireless sex toy company admitted it was tracking sensitive data about its users’ uh ... endurance.

Yet even this is just the dawn of the overinformation age. Facialrecognition technology is now getting scarily accurate and will soon be spotting our face in every crowd.

The FBI already has half of Americans in its facial-recognition bank, using their drivers’ licences — and eventually Canadian security and big stores will, too.

In-store cameras will spot you walking by that 40-slice, self-buttering toaster they know you like from your Google search history — then the gadget will send you a personal text as you near.

“Josh, I know you want me. Take me! I’ll butter up a bagel that melts in your mouth and makes you forget that cheap KitchenAid relic you live with today.”

Oh, did I mention that facereading, lie-detector technology can now analyze 100 points around your eyes, mouth and brow to detect if you’re lying. So the real estate agent will soon know what you’re thinking when you make that “final” offer.

The entire concept of privacy seems doomed to be a quaint relic of the 20th century we AGREED to give up. So what can you do to protect your privacy while you still have any?

The first defence is a password so complex no one can hack it, including you. A typical online privacy site advises: “Construct your password from a sentence, then mix in some uppercase letters and a number.”

For example: “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” — which becomes ‘aoOPiwaPoC62’. But make sure to change it every month.

You could also embrace thumbprint technology that’s replacing easily hacked passwords. But how long before someone hacks a billion thumbprints — and instead of changing your password you’ll have to get a thumb job?

If you’re cheating on your exams, taxes or spouse it might be wise to buy some “burner” phones you can throw away when you cross the U.S. border.

You can also dumb down your spying SmartTV by ripping out the Internet cables and only watching bad network TV. Better yet, just stop using the Internet altogether — I mean do you really need it?

Finally, read a print newspaper like the one you may be holding now. It’s the last thing you can do that you’re sure no one is tracking.

Someday your voice-recognition fridge may testify against you about a bank robbery you plotted in your kitchen.