We’re All Being Tracked (Premium)

Thanks to the ever-increasing integration of technology into our personal lives, we’re being tracked more than ever. This tracking can be desirable and explicitly enabled or it can be creepy and automatic, something that happens silently in the background and seemingly without our our knowledge or choice. Or it can be some combination of the two.

I’m of two minds when it comes to tracking. I’m not as concerned about privacy as some seem to be, but then I live a fairly transparent semi-public life. But like many of you, I’ve been taken aback by the weird and impossibly coincidental nature of some tracking incursions. I’m sure we all have a Google story to tell.

Not all tracking is pernicious, of course. In fact, we may explicitly choose to track certain life metrics specifically because we are trying to improve ourselves. Or we may opt-in to a more general form of tracking, as when we use a digital assistant like Cortana, Google Assistant, or Siri. That latter use case may be the most unsettling, frankly, because we are often broadly giving an AI entity access to our personal information in the hopes that it will make us more efficient or at least “better” in some way.

There are arguments to be made about the “dumbening” of humanity, of our over-reliance on technology when it comes to finding answers to anything, immediately (Google), especially when it comes to directions and navigation (Google Maps). Having driven across the United States multiple times in my life, I still openly wonder how my first such trip, at age 18 in 1985 in a 1972 VW Super Beetle, ever ended successfully. But I also recoil at our current over-reliance on Google Maps; have, in fact, argued with my wife to put down the damn phone and let us just get there ourselves on many occasions.

But I track things. And I am tracked.

For example, I use Grammarly to track how much I write, though this service is limited to the web browsers I use, meaning that it does not count the book writing or note-taking that I do.

Last week, I clocked in at over 50,000 words, and Grammarly noted that I was more productive than 99% of its users, used more unique words than 99% of its users, and was more accurate than 90% of its users. But this past week, when I lost two days to flying and was in Hawaii, a distracting location, I only hit 30,000 words; that figure is still more productive than 98% of Grammarly users, the service noted.

That kind of tracking is useful to me because it gives me a good idea of how much content I’m creating, and while “volume” certainly doesn’t equal “quality,” I like the weekly check-ins.

This week, I received an interesting corollary to the Grammarly data: the “read it later” service Pocket, which I use and strongly recommend, sent me an email to tell me that I was in the top 5 percent of its readers (by volume, presumably).

“You’re a top reader in Pocket for 2017,” the email noted. “Not only did you make it into the top 5%, you’ve also exercised your brain and undoubtedly learned a ton in the process.”

Undoubtedly. I don’t need Pocket to tell me that I read a lot, and of course I also read elsewhere: On the web directly, ebooks at Amazon, audiobooks at Audible (yes, I’ll toss that into the reading bucket), newspapers (digitally), and more. But this was an interesting confirmation that I actually use the service, which I knew, and use it more than most (which I’d have no way of knowing). I don’t need or want a weekly or monthly recap from Pocket. But getting an end-of-year update was a nice surprise.

(My wife uses a service called 750 Words to cajole her into writing at least some fiction—at least 750 words, get it?—every day. Given that I don’t write fiction and write, on average, about 6200 words per day, more on weekdays, less on weekends—I don’t really need/want this kind of service. But it’s interesting.)

Tracking plays a big role in fitness and diet and nutrition, as you’d expect. I don’t track what I eat—though I will be writing about that more in a coming Health Hacking: Food article—but I do track my physical activity with Fitbit. (An Alta, in my case.) There is some debate about the efficacy of such tracking—in fact, studies have consistently shown that fitness trackers fail most people (or vice versa)—but I still like having it.

Here’s what Fitbit tells me: I don’t move enough. And I have a hard time hitting even 5,000 steps in a day unless I walk or am traveling. In which cases I can hit 10,000 steps, which, for some reason, is the goal.

So, I don’t really need Fitbit to tell me this, just as I don’t need a study to explain why sitting in front of a computer all day every day is unhealthy: I know I don’t move enough. But I keep telling myself I will move more, will, in fact, move a bit each hour. I suspect this kind of tracking, and the motivation of getting an alert “buzz” on your wrist each hour—I often don’t feel it—will motivate some, but not others.

Before I started my keto/low-carb diet, I used to track my beer consumption, which sounds ludicrous in retrospect. (Drinking beer at all also sounds ludicrous in retrospect, but that’s a different story.) On that note, my joke was that I used Fitbit to track my health, and Untappd to track my drinking, and between the two I found balance. Yes, I’m hilarious. But just as a “well-balanced breakfast” is an invention of American food lobbyists—there’s no such thing as a well-balanced breakfast—this kind of balance is a lie. Not drinking at all would certainly better my balance. (See? I told you I was hilarious.)

But Untappd represents an interesting kind of tracking: It’s opt-in, of course, and like any social media service—Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, whatever; they’re all tracking you too, by the way—it requires your explicit participation to be successful. And what Untappd has done is what Duolingo has done for language learning: It turns a repeated task into a game. These services have gamified tracking.

Duolingo is wonderful, and I’ve recommended it in the past and have been using it daily for years. Sadly, Duolingo has also been overrun with ads, which sucks. This service was once promoted as something that would always be free because the company made money by crowd-sourcing the translations performed by users and selling them to CNN and others. Guess that wasn’t too lucrative.

But whatever. Duolingo is still the best mobile app for language learning, and I spend at least 15-20 minutes with it every day. It tracks my progress, of course, my daily usage streak, and more. And that keeps me going in ways that Fitbit, for some reason, does not.

No conversation about tracking can be complete without at least mentioning Google. As noted, we all have stories. But the Google tracking I’m most interested in happens in Google Maps. I elected some time ago to become a “local guide,” which is Google’s gamification-style way to get its users to participate and improve the service with reviews and ratings, photos, and location updates.

Google Maps/Local Guides emails me regularly, and the most recent email noted that I had added my 500th photo, and that my photos have been viewed almost 2.5 million times, collectively, in Google Maps. My most popular photo, of a meal at my favorite restaurant in Paris, Le Bon Saint Pourcain, has almost 345,000 views. A photo at my favorite restaurant overall, Bamboo in Dedham, Massachusetts, has over 280,000 views.

Google tells me that these photos, and my reviews, are “making a difference.” And … OK. I think that’s probably fair. But as many of you have noticed for yourself, Google is also perhaps overly-enthusiastic when it comes to getting us to participate. It feels like I can’t even leave the house anymore without getting a notification on my phone alerting me that “someone has a question” about some place, or that the place I may (or may not) be at “is popular with Google Maps users,” and perhaps I’d like to take and upload some photos. Needy much, Google? Maybe I need to dial this stuff back a bit. OK, not maybe.

Anyway, if you’re worried about tracking, you’ll need to do some real digging to turn off the behaviors you dislike the most. Or maybe you could use the mobile app Calm—which Apple just announced was the best app of 2017—to “reduce your anxiety, sleep better and feel happier.” How does it do this, you ask? Via a daily subscription via which Calm will prompt you, each day, to meditate.

Right. It’s yet another tracker. Mediate on that.