But look a little closer at this new pop-up, which opens its doors on Wednesday in London's West End.

Here's a visualisation of the extraordinary reach of the modern Google empire, which through $US29 billion ($37 billion) in tech acquisitions now has the ability, in the words of its chairman, to "know where you've been [and] more or less what you're thinking about".

Here's a model of Mark Zuckerberg's house: the Facebook founder, who has claimed the age of privacy is over, bought the four houses surrounding his Palo Alto home and told his interior designers to sign non-disclosure agreements.

Here's an exploration of the huge dossiers that invisible data broker corporations have amassed on individual consumers who traded their privacy for online convenience

And at the back of the store is a Data Detox Bar where "ingeniuses" will help you build your very own "fake news" and on request, they'll give you an "8-day data detox kit".

The Glass Room is a "disruptive tech store with nothing for sale", say its creators - a collective who describe themselves as "smelly activists from Berlin".

They intend it to draw in unsuspecting West End browsers, who will find themselves challenged to "reconsider the technologies you use every day, how much they reveal about you, and what choices you can make in our quantified society".

Marek Tusznski, who co-curated the project and is creative director and co-founder of Tactical Tech Collective, said they wanted to build an exhibition "that would engage people that are not interested or want to engage in these kind of narratives, on quantification and Big Brother and so on".

"The reason people are unable to engage in this topic is because there are no places for that. So we have created a format that makes it possible."

Their store "would emulate the experience you get at other stores of big companies such as Google and Apple", he said.

"People can walk in and immerse themselves in something that is very familiar at first and visually appealing, and yet enables them to ask questions that are otherwise very hard to ask such as what is your actual data footprint, and what you can do about it."

It was broader than just complaining about corporate misbehaviour and government surveillance, Tusznski said.

"We all normalise surveillance as a solution to many problems??? but what is the business model behind that, and what does that combination of information and wealth give them in terms of power?"

The Glass Room is produced by Mozilla, an American non-profit that calls itself "champion of the internet".

Daniel Kessler, senior brand manager at Mozilla said the internet "should be for people not for profit".

The Glass Room was intended to raise really challenging questions about the role of technology in society, he said.

"Billions of people depend on an open and accessible internet - they depend on it for knowledge, livelihoods, to express themselves, for love, for connection, to stay up to speed. That obviously is a great thing??? but at the same time there's a growing movement that's coming together to make the internet healthier because people are concerned around who has access to this platform, how much power is being concentrated in a handful of companies, what does it mean for our politics, our culture and our daily lives.

"We've obviously had a very rude awakening over the last few years, particularly since November and our presidential election, and the conversation is now turning towards just how powerful are these tools and what influence are they having?

"People should be able to choose with clarity and confidence what information they want to share with the government, companies and each other, and they should be able to understand what the trade-offs are."

London is the Glass Room's second incarnation - it was first tried in New York.

Tusznski said it had been a big risk.

"We were not sure how people would react, would they go inside, would they engage in conversations, would they ask questions would they be scared of talking to Ingeniuses?" Tusznski said.

"We were told people wouldn't spend more than 30 seconds looking at objects and wouldn't stay longer than 10 minutes in the whole thing."

But it confounded expectations.

"We had way more people coming in, we had people staying longer than 40 minutes and bringing friends back. And the discussions were very deep and very fruitful."

He hopes London will prove the same.

And Tusznski and Kessler said they "could and would" bring the idea to Australia in the future.