I found myself digging through his Facebook page, only to learn that he had passed away. I immediately closed my computer, feeling I had somehow overstepped my inquiry.

Since people began downloading their Google and Facebook data in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, much of the conversation has centered around privacy and advertisers. But as I dug into my own data, I wondered more about the personal details of my past that could be uncovered in my digital record.

It was comical to see the meta-view of my behavioral patterns: There were several months when I went through a spastic cycle of deactivating and reactivating the account, and I could see all the mysterious people I had unfriended in purges. It was also odd to learn that I was categorized by Facebook (for advertisers) as someone who was “interested in” topics like “choir” (I’m not a singer), “complex number” (what?), “life” (true, I guess) and “political prisoner” (I had no idea this could be an interest, per se.)

But it was much more interesting to be a voyeur of myself.

At the dawn of social media, I never would have imagined that my youth was being recorded. Looking at the data now is like accessing pages from a diary I didn’t intend to keep — an honest snapshot of my speaking habits, my treatment of other people and their treatment of me, over the course of more than a decade. It was highly telling in the way anything captured by an insentient machine can be.