Just over 10 years ago, Apple unveiled its App store. Since then, we’ve downloaded hundreds of billions of apps. They help us navigate cities, tell us the weather, teach us new languages and keep us connected. In return, these companies ask us for something precious: our personal information, including our every movement via location tracking. This isn’t some aberration, this is how our technology and advertising platforms were designed.

Think about it this way: Americans would be furious if the government required that every person must carry a tracking device that broadcast their location dozens of times each day, forever.

And yet Americans have, with every terms of service agreement they click “agree” on, consented to just such a system run by private companies. Tens of millions of Americans, including many children, are now carrying spies in their pockets. They go everywhere. To work, to the gym and then on their bedside tables. All in the service of better personalized alerts, turn-by-turn directions and more persuasive targeted advertising.

In recent months, we’ve spoken with people we’ve found in the data. Their reaction is surprising — a blend of contradictory emotions like outrage and apathy. It seems we don’t quite have the language to talk about this kind of surveillance. We hope seeing the scale and granularity of this information will help us all start to develop a working vocabulary for the world we now inhabit.

As we begin to wrap up our reporting on this tracking series and take stock of what we uncovered, it remains striking how quickly the world has changed. The location tracking industry didn’t really exist until the end of the 2000s. Powerful location-based apps became ubiquitous in the blink of an eye. As the decade closes, we’re inundated with stories of privacy invasions, from data breaches to smart speakers to hackable doorbell cameras and now to location-gobbling apps. It feels like a defining theme of the 2010s. We were sold a future of personalization and convenience and paid for it with little pieces of ourselves that we can never get back.