The Signal #12
The next frontier of data is you, offline.
I received an email recently inviting me to join a waitlist for a new kind of sales intelligence service. The service proposed gathering “offline behavioural data” through micro-drones designed to follow potential customers for days or weeks. The goal was to generate insights that cannot be scraped or inferred online. One use example was how quickly someone returns a shopping trolley, described as a reliable predictor of whether they pay invoices on time.
It reads like speculative fiction, but it is presented as a plausible product. And that makes it a signal. At one level, this is simply an extension of the current trajectory. For the past two decades, commerce has been shaped by an expanding capacity to observe, track, and predict behaviour. Digital platforms built vast infrastructures to capture clicks, preferences, networks, and transactions. The economic logic was that better data leads to better targeting, which leads to higher conversion rates.
What this new proposition suggests is that the boundary of what counts as measurable behaviour is shifting again. When the digital layer becomes saturated or regulated, the incentive moves elsewhere. The offline world, long considered too messy and costly to capture at scale, becomes the next frontier.
Seen this way, the idea of airborne observation is not an anomaly but a continuation. If behaviour can be observed, it can be modelled. If it can be modelled, it can be monetised. The weak signal is not the drone itself. It is the normalisation of behavioural extraction beyond environments where individuals have any meaningful expectation of being observed.
This marks an important shift in the relationship between individuals and markets. Digital tracking has already blurred the line between public and private spaces, but it has largely operated within infrastructures people knowingly engage with, even if imperfectly understood. You open an app, visit a website, accept cookies. There is at least a formal entry point into the system.
The scenario implied here removes even that thin layer of awareness. Behaviour in physical space, outside any explicit transactional context, becomes a source of data input. The distinction between participation and observation begins to erode.
This connects to a broader pattern that has been emerging across different domains: the expansion of systems optimised for efficiency into domains where agency becomes harder to exercise.
From the perspective of firms, the logic is compelling. Information asymmetry is costly. Reducing uncertainty about customers improves decision-making. In competitive markets, any firm that can access richer behavioural data gains an advantage. If one actor adopts such techniques, others face pressure to follow.
From the perspective of individuals, the picture looks different. The capacity to shape how one is perceived, to decide what information is shared and in what context, begins to weaken. Small actions, stripped of context, are turned into signals that feed decision systems elsewhere.
This raises a question about who has the authority to define the boundaries of observation in a society where the technical capacity to observe keeps expanding.
At the national level, existing privacy frameworks were designed around identifiable data, consent mechanisms, and specific contexts of data collection. They are already under strain from digital platforms. Extending them to cover diffuse, ambient data collection in physical space is significantly more complex. A shift toward offline behavioural surveillance would test whether current frameworks are adaptable or whether they are too closely tied to earlier technological assumptions.
Globally, different jurisdictions will likely take divergent approaches shaped by political priorities and institutional capacity. Some may restrict such practices early. Others may allow them to develop, particularly if they are seen as commercially advantageous or strategically useful. The result could be uneven standards, with firms operating across borders navigating a patchwork of rules.
There is also a distributional dimension. The benefits of enhanced behavioural insight accrue to those who can deploy and analyse the data, typically firms with significant resources. The costs, in terms of reduced privacy and agency, are diffused across individuals. As with many data-driven systems, the asymmetry is structural.
What makes this signal particularly revealing is how it exposes the limits of existing governance approaches. Much of current policy thinking focuses on managing data after it has been collected: ensuring it is processed fairly, stored securely, or used transparently. The scenario here shifts attention upstream, to the conditions under which data is generated in the first place. It suggests that the core question may not be how to regulate data, but how to define the legitimacy of observation itself.
This is not entirely new. Societies have long set boundaries around surveillance, distinguishing between acceptable and unacceptable forms of monitoring. What is changing is the scale and granularity at which observation can occur, and the actors capable of deploying it. Surveillance is no longer the exclusive domain of states, but part of a commercial service.
The forward horizon is uncertain. It is entirely possible that ideas like “airborne lead intelligence” remain niche or face early resistance. Technical, legal, or social barriers may limit their adoption. But as a signal, it points to a direction of travel.
The deeper issue is whether governance systems can evolve quickly enough to shape the norms of emerging technologies before those norms become embedded through use. Once a practice becomes standard, it tends to be justified by its ubiquity.
What this signal offers is an early glimpse of a potential future in which the scope of observable behaviour expands beyond current expectations. There is a tendency to treat such developments as either inevitable or implausible. They are neither. They are contingent on choices made by firms, regulators, and societies about what is permissible, what is valuable, and what trade-offs are acceptable.
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Warmly,
Sanja
Reads of the week
CEPS: If autocrats hate the EU, then it’s doing something right
Unchambered: If you can ask a human, you can ask an AI
Global Inequality and More 3.0: Asia’s Rise and the Self-Undermining Logic of Neoliberalism
