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“Contemporary surveillance practices make it difficult to get lost in the crowd, as the Coldplay incident illustrates,” says Chicago-Kent College of Law Professor .

On Wednesday, July 16, 2025, the CEO and another senior leader at tech company Astronomer who are not married to each other were caught on a “” at a Coldplay concert. The moment, caught on camera, went viral, and both executives resigned.

While the incident serves as a reminder that there are cameras everywhere, Warner says it is still possible to keep a low profile in 2025, provided the stars are on your side.

“My wife and I dined at Le Grand Colbert in Paris this spring, but, even though I mention it here, it is highly likely that our dining there will remain obscure and attract no one’s notice,” he says. “That could have easily been the case for the Coldplay couple if they had not had the bad luck of being caught on camera.”

That’s not to say that there is no record of what we do in our lives.

Warner has written extensively about the digital traces we leave behind, such as in his most recent book, written with Robert H. Sloan, The Privacy Fix: How To Preserve Privacy in the Onslaught of Surveillance (Cambridge University Press 2021).

In that book, Warner quotes John Gilliom and Torin Monohan’s SuperVision: An Introduction to the Surveillance Society (2012): “If you figure that your life is so disorganized, private, and fragmented that no biographer would or could keep track of it, think again—your biography is being written as you read these pages.”

To return to Warner’s own example of the night he enjoyed dining out in Paris with his wife, while the incident likely would not have garnered anyone’s attention, there is still a record.

“If someone wanted to take the time and trouble to investigate, they could discover that we dined at Le Grand Colbert since I paid with a credit card,” says Warner. “Pervasive data collection and analysis writes our biographies, and—if someone is interested—it is there to read.”