At the Market, Everyone Knows You
Author’s Note: This article uses a declared narrative fiction—a walk through the agro-food market in Botoșani—as a metaphor for browsing the internet without protection. The market scenes are literary constructs, not journalistic accounts. The technical guide within the article is real and functional. The article was written with assistance, in accordance with the transparency policy declared on this site.
It’s a Saturday morning.
I leave the house at half past eight.
The main market in Botoșani is a twenty-minute walk away—past the town hall, down the back of the cultural centre. I’ve known the route since I was a child. I could walk it blindfolded—the puddles after the rain, the occasional whiff of diesel from a passing cart, the vendors’ voices calling out prices to no one in particular and to everyone at once.
But this morning, something is different.
At the first street corner, a man I don’t know looks up from his phone and says, “Good morning. Off to buy vegetables?”
I stop. I stare at him. I don’t recognise him.
“How do you know that?” I ask.
“You go every Saturday,” he says simply. “You usually buy tomatoes, cucumbers if they’re good, sometimes cheese from the woman at the second corner. You buy less when it’s the end of the month. It’s the end of the month now.”
I swallow hard and walk on without answering. At the next corner, a woman with a notebook in her hand greets me before I can even look at her: “We know you have high blood pressure, Mr. Petru. The woman at the cheese stall said you take it unsalted.”
At the market entrance, a man in an orange vest stops me politely: “We have a special offer on spine supplements. We know you spend a lot of time at your desk.”
I turn around and go home. I haven’t bought a thing.
This is fiction. There are no people with notebooks at the street corners of Botoșani—only a complex web of interests, but within the bounds of common sense.
But there are browsers.
And your browser, in its default configuration, does exactly what I described above—with one key difference: it does it invisibly, without warning, and sells the collected information before you even get home.