If you're like most generation Xers and millennials -- decked out in electronics -- then you are being watched, listened to and your every move is being tracked. But it's not the government that's doing it, although they probably have access, it's corporations. And it's all in the name of making money.

To me the fact that corporations are the ones surveilling us is even scarier. That's because when it comes to making money, conscience, morals and ethics are usually thrown out the window. And without much rules and regulations in place, anything is possible.

In most cases the companies excuse what they're doing by saying that this information is used to optimize advertising or send people targeted ads, but is there more to it?

The most powerful tool used for this surveillance is our smartphones. Your phone's camera can watch you, it's also listening to you via Google Assistant and Siri, and tracking where you're doing via their location services. It's not only your phone, if you have one of those Amazon Alexa devices it's listening too, and any camera device that connects to the internet can potentially track you as well. Companies claim that we're asked permission first and we have the option to disable location services or turn off Siri. But that's not always the case.

Some people would say, "what's the danger if we're not doing anything wrong," my answer would be, what if it falls in the wrong hands? What if a corrupt person in a position of authority wants to stop someone from exposing them or for any other nefarious purpose, can't they use this information to harm people? Regardless if we have something to hide, or not we should all have the right to privacy without having to live in an isolated world.

Technically there are ways to turn off location tracking and disable the voice assistants that listen to us, but there's no guarantee that they will actually stop their surveillance tracking as we mentioned earlier. One surefire way to stop your phone's camera from watching you is to cover it with tape, but that won't stop the sound.

In any case, it's probably a good idea to take measures to try and stop or at least mitigate this corporate surveillance. But you should know that your phone is always watching over you in some way, even if you don't want it to.