A vision of the future with bleak outlook for privacy

The story was set in 2005. Only eight years late, the technology is here; and it may be more revolutionary than even Gibson imagined. His data spectacles were unusual and expensive; Google Glass is likely to be within almost everyone's reach. The beta test versions, which are being tried out by early adopters, cost $1500, but the finished product – which may be out by the end of the year – is likely to be cheaper. Within a couple of years, it's virtually certain that these glasses, or similar competitors, will be as cheap and as widespread as smartphones are now. (Actually, they will probably tether to smartphones, like a Bluetooth headset.)

If you're one of the ever-shrinking minority of people who have never used a computer or owned a mobile phone, you may think that this won't affect you. In fact, this technology will be more transformative than either of those, because there will be no getting away from it.

Unlike a phone, you'll have no choice about whether you use it or not; simply by being out in public, you will fall into its reach. And unlike CCTV, whether operated by public authorities or commercial premises, your movements, conversations and everything else you do within range of anyone wearing such a device could potentially be held on Google's servers forever, without your having any say in the matter.

Right now, people probably won't use them to record much video, because it uses lots of battery power and storage. But it won't be long before performance improves; one Google search today uses more computing power than the entirety of the computing done through the 11 years and 17 missions of the Apollo programme. Soon at least some users will routinely record everything. If there are millions of these devices around, and I am certain there will be, it will be impossible to avoid being in their line of vision.

The reason this matters, of course, is that it is Google which will have this data; and Google is a company which has as its primary purpose the storage, aggregation, analysis and marketing of information. GPS in phones already means that software can anticipate where an individual will be at a given time with better accuracy than the person himself; Facebook and other social media enable the tagging of photographs of anyone (frequently without their knowledge, let alone permission), while facial recognition software can cross-reference that shot with any others held in the cloud.

In short, within the next three or four years, privacy will, in effect, be absolutely impossible. If you doubt this, think of Google Street View, which already provides a panoramic record of almost every location in the developed world – and imagine it in real time.

The technology blogger Robert Scoble, who has been trying out Google Glass for the past fortnight, has already decided that he will never do without it, or something similar. What's more, he found that "most of the privacy concerns I had before- just didn't show up. I was shocked by how few negative reactions I got". Tellingly, he found that amongst those under 21, there was practically no interest in the civil liberties' implications of the technology.

This is interesting, because young people are the group most likely to be libertarian, opposed to state surveillance and censorship and suspicious of, for example, anti-terrorism legislation – whether directed at freedom of speech or of movement. But many seem happy to sign away those rights – to Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, or Google – if the technology on offer makes life more convenient. Offer them some cool glasses which will find you a sushi bar, or check if your flight's on time, or take a picture, and they won't even pause to read the terms and conditions.

I don't blame them, either. The most important factor here, after all, has nothing to do with any ideological stance, either in favour of privacy or of freedom of speech, nor even, when it comes down to it, whether people believe these powers to track, record and analyse our every move are undesirable or dangerous.

What matters is the near-universal judgment by almost everyone under 30 (and probably the majority of those under 50) that, whether we like it or not, it is the way that things are. The virtual world predicted by Gibson is reality now. You can do some things to avoid the build-up of information held about you by corporations – don't use loyalty cards, keep off the internet, pay by cash – but most of them make life more difficult. Already, some things can only be done online.

The generation which has grown up since computer technology became genuinely useful and unavoidable for everyone (I'd date that from around the turn of the century) finds some ideas universally held before then utterly alien. The most obvious is copyright. The mistake those who resist technology make is to think of this as a right which is being violated; but the job of copyright is to ensure that people who create music, or journalism, or films, or anything known in the digital era as "content", get paid. In an age of free, instant reproduction of data, it is a mechanism which is no use for that task any more. The challenge is to find some other mechanism.

Similarly, there is no point in banging on about your privacy being invaded. The lobbying group Hacked Off is on a hiding to nothing, even if it forces newspapers into a regulatory code, because anyone with a mobile phone can already film, write, photograph and publish anything in a few seconds. Privacy as we have known it is over. We will certainly need codes of conduct, but those are going to have to be about manners, rather than new laws or regulations, because you can't legislate for the whole of the public sphere. And from now on, it's all public.