cheryl
Administrator
Staff member
Who controls your data? - Engadget
We requested our personal information from dozens of companies. Here’s what they gave us -- and what they didn’t.
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.
We requested our personal information from dozens of companies. Here’s what they gave us -- and what they didn’t.
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.