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...