In his rather dystopian foray into an educated prophecy about what society will look like 100 years from now, the celebrated historian Yuval Noah Harari remarked: "We will be the last generation of homo sapiens. In 100 years, the species that will inherit the Earth will be as different to us as we are from Neanderthals or chimpanzees." Equally telling was his assertion that the future of humankind will be decided by the people that own our data. With the pace at which the development of big data and artificial intelligence (AI) is gathering momentum and influencing our daily lives, this is probably going to happen much faster than Harari predicted. We, as humanity, submit ourselves to technological innovations that are radically changing our way of life and compromising our privacy beyond repair, without stopping to reflect on what it may be doing to us as individuals or societies.