Say what you will about Edward Snowden, but the fact of the matter is that we now know a bit more about exactly how much privacy we have. Not as much as we thought a month and a half ago.

But if you don’t like that answer and wanted to disappear off the grid — but not drop out of daily life — could you? And if so, what would you have to do?

New York Magazine writer Kevin Roose spent a day trying to live completely surveillance-free.

Roose said that if his goal was to avoid all surveillance, he definitely failed.  “I don’t think it’s possible to live a modern life and not be surveilled. Even if you surveillance-proof all your gadgets, some satellite is going to be able to find you,” said Roose.

Roose says the moral of his “surveillance-free” experiment is that every new technological tool that sends and receives data about us comes at a cost.  “With each new thing that we adopt into our lives we’re giving something up,” said Roose. “And that’s real.”

Read Kevin Roose’s piece here.