Now, more than ever, human beings are capable of recording themselves. Whether it be what they had for breakfast, what is on their mind, where they were and with who, what they were just listening to, etc. We have reached a point in human history where the smallest activities and the most mundane events in our lives are recorded en masse. And as humans, it seems that we have an intrinsic need to share what we have. From our metadata to our tweets, we not only record our personal information, but share it too (and on a massive scale). It is an unprecedented moment in time, where so many of our actions are now stored in a cloud, accessible to anyone with some form of computer that can make use of radio signals. The implications of these advancements in information technology are widespread, reaching from issues with personal data being bought or sold all the way to having the ability to know more about oneself or another and with impeccable detail.

For a second, try and think about every little thing you do during the day that in some way leads to information about you being recorded. You wake up and check your phone, you respond to a text from a friend you received from the night before. That is recording one. From there, you scroll through your Twitter and like a few tweets, maybe even retweet one. Recording 2 to n. You continue checking your social media, email, etc. and by the time you’re done you have more than likely already left several digital “footprints” all over the place. As the day goes on you get coffee purchased with a credit card, leaving another footprint. With some number of phone calls, texts, Instagram posts, articles read, videos viewed, songs listened to, and so on you’ve left little footprints everywhere marking where you’ve been, what you did and with who, at what time, and maybe even some information about why. At the end of your day, someone with this information would know absurdly more about how you spent your day than any detailed account of it you could give to them.

So why is this a big deal? It’s not like any one person has access to all of these separate data feeds (save some NSA employees). What would a terrorist do with my Spotify playlists? These questions have no easy answer. If someone were capable of stealing ALL of this information, what could they really do with it? They would more than likely be able to accuse of some crime (unfortunately, breaking the Terms of Service on any website is a felony), but most likely one so small that anyone willing to take the time to prosecute you would need to seriously look at their time management skills. The NSA or any other entity with the computational power could easily set up an incredible surveillance operation using your personal data, but the NSA is only targeting people they have an interest in. Sorry, but the likelihood that the NSA cares about you is slim to none. Perhaps the scariest part of all this is what they can do but haven’t yet. Like swimming in a pool of sharks, they COULD attack you, but they are more likely to leave you alone unless provoked. So why else might all these footprints be important?

We have now, what are in essence, “mega-diaries.” Every individual with a digital footprint has, in some way, their own mega-diary. Unlike other diaries, we don’t really get to choose what we put in them. Sure we get to choose our own playlists, choose what we post (or at least decide whether or not a service does it for us), choose which apps we use, and even how much time we spend on all of these things. But our mega-diaries hold far more information than any standard journal entry would. Mega-diaries have all that and more. We get all the info about all juicy he-said-she-said gossip, but information about where that information was originally shared from, whose network was used, maybe even an exact location are all also recorded. Your Facebook post, combined with multiple other streams of data turn into one thoroughly detailed mega-diary, that says more about you than you’d probably like to think (just look at data mining).

And now there is all this information just sitting around. Who has it? Who can look at it? Is anyone even looking at it? These are the questions that bother me the most. There is all this data sitting around, and I’m not really sure what is being done with it. Some of this data is used in online shopping, bringing you one step closer to making your most informed (pun intended) purchase possible by using your search and browsing history to find things you might be looking for. Spotify uses your listening history to automatically generate playlists for you. Maybe it is cross fed from one applications to another, like with Instagram or Spotify and Tinder to give your potential matches more information about who you are. And yet, Tinder only allows you to select from a small range of artists to represent yourself. And Spotify doesn’t really ask you whether you want those playlists or not. More and more, the data that we produce and have manipulated is less in our hands.

There is always a level of agency in what we choose to do. Yet it’s more like we get to choose from what somebody else chose for us. Maybe I don’t like any of the clothes in a store, well then it is up to me to go somewhere and try to find something that I like. I choose to use certain applications and visit certain websites, but I don’t have a say in what music goes on Spotify; I choose from what has been given to me. The same goes for much of the information about our actions that get stored and used. I choose to use Facebook, therefore on some level I am choosing to have certain details about me be recorded, shared, and potentially manipulated. I didn’t really intend to, but nonetheless I am agreeing to things I’m not horribly comfortable with. It’s a lot like my relationship with Xfinity, I chose to purchase a plan with Xfinity but my options were either: Xfinity, shitty internet, or no internet. My level of agency is basically reduced to whether or not I want what is basically a necessity of modern American living. With social media and the like having reduced agency does not have as severe consequences, but the reduction in agency is still relevant. Moreso, the things “in charge” of this data are more often algorithms rather than people.

I feel that it is important to ask why we don’t have access to the information we create, why so much of it is privatized, and why there are so few options for me to avoid giving out so much personal information (while it gets used, with “sort of” having my consent). It is important to understand what is rightfully ours, who has it, and what they can do with it. As humans we are able to record our lives with unprecedented detail, but a lot of the information that gets saved is outside of our grasp. Technology continues to grow at exponential speeds, and us humans need to figure out what the hell is going on before our innovations far surpass our ability to control and understand them.