Your car is selling your data. I need you to sit with that for a second. Not "might be." Not "in some cases." Your car — the thing you paid forty grand for — is a data harvester with wheels, and it's been ratting you out to insurers, marketers, and God knows who else. This week, Revolut confirmed a customer data breach through fake government requests. Same week, LG had to respond to TV spying allegations. A Flock worker called the cops on a reporter filming a public camera installation. Here's the thing nobody wants to say out loud: the biggest tech trend of the coming months isn't AI. It's the bill coming due for a decade of surveillance disguised as convenience. I've spent my whole life arguing that technology married with the humanities makes our hearts sing. What we have now is technology married with the actuarial table. It's a spreadsheet wearing a pretty interface. And you're the product inside it. Look at the actual numbers. Most organizations skip permissions reviews before deploying AI tools (Source: Infosecurity Magazine, 2026). That's not a rounding error. That's the entire industry admitting it doesn't know what it installed. Target is deepening its AI push with photo search and review insights. Clinical trials are getting AI-enabled. Every one of these systems touches your data, and almost none of them can tell you where it goes. The real story in the coming months is a collision. On one side: agentic automation, AI workflows, tools that promise to run your life for you. On the other side: regulators waking up. The EU AI Act's Article 26 is already exposing how badly third-party risk programs handle AI vendors. The UK says new AI health tools need "L-plates." The adults are finally in the room. And what does the industry do? Sam Altman says going public in 2026 would be "ill-advised." Anthropic's CEO outlines a plan to slow AI development. Khosla Ventures opens a New York office. Y Combinator's Garry Tan wants open-weight labs to "distill" frontier models. Everybody's hedging. Nobody's committing. That's what a bubble sounds like when it starts to feel its own weight. Here's my advice, and it's the same advice I've given for forty years. Stop asking what the technology can do. Start asking what it should do. The companies that win the next eighteen months won't be the ones with the most features. They'll be the ones that own the whole experience and take full responsibility for it. End to end. Hardware, software, and the data. If you can't control the whole widget, you can't protect the person holding it. The rest of them are just selling your car's data and calling it innovation. FAQ Q1: What's the biggest tech trend to watch in the coming months? The collision between AI-driven data collection and regulation. Most organizations skip permissions reviews before deploying AI tools (Source: Infosecurity Magazine, 2026), and regulators like the EU are now forcing the issue through frameworks like AI Act Article 26. Q2: Is your car really selling your data? Yes. Modern vehicles collect and transmit driving behavior, location, and usage data to third parties, including insurers and marketers. It's one of the least-discussed privacy problems in consumer tech right now. Q3: What should I do about it? Demand end-to-end accountability from the companies you buy from. If a product can't tell you exactly where your data goes, don't buy it. That's the only review that matters.