dataretrieval
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My digital shadow looks nothing like me
I have a shadow. There's the Dan Cooper writing these words right now, standing at his desk in an attic in Norwich, England. There is also the Dan Cooper who has the same name and address but who only exists inside a computer sitting on a shelf. I had never heard of this man until a couple of months ago, but now I am intimately familiar with who he is, his contradictions and the terrible truth he may reflect upon me.
Who controls your data?
The average American, one study tell us, touches their phone 2,600 times per day. By the end of a given year, that's nearly a million touches, rising to two million if you're a power user. Each one of those taps, swipes and pulls is a potential proxy for our most intimate behaviors. Our phones are not only tools that help us organize our day but also sophisticated monitoring devices that we voluntarily feed with interactions we think are private. The questions we ask Google, for instance, can be more honest than the ones we ask our loved ones -- a "digital truth serum," as ex-Googler and author Seth Stephens-Davidowitz writes in Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are. Hoover up these data points and combine them with all of our other devices -- smart TVs, fitness trackers, cookies that stalk us across the web -- and there exists an ambient, ongoing accumulation of our habits to the tune of about 2.5 quintillion (that's a million trillion) bytes of data per day.
