Moves. RescueTime. Fitbit. MyFitnessPal. RunKeeper. Sleep Cycle. Swarm. Reporter. Lift. Mint. Last.fm. I do a lot of self tracking. I know where I’ve gone, how I got there, how much I spent on stuff while I was there, and what music I was listening to at the time. I know, down to the minute, how much time I spend on Facebook while using my laptop. Several times a day, my phone buzzes to ask me what I’m doing, where I am, and what app I used last. There’s data tracking how many steps I’ve taken for the last six months, and data on my sleep for almost that same amount of time. Every time I arrive at my office, and every time I leave it gets logged to a spreadsheet in Google Docs. There is precious little I do not know about my habits, online and offline.
The point of the Quantified Self movement is that once you have a bunch of data on yourself, you can identify patterns—and then things to change to improve yourself. Then, you check your new data, and if the change is working, keep at it. It’s about self-awareness, and then self-improvement. That’s the spirit, at least, with which I embarked on the step-tracking, location-logging, iPhone-buzzing, self-reporting endeavor. And, yes, it’s been useful in some ways. Knowing how many steps I take during a day has inspired me to move more. Logging my calories makes me want to seek out healthier lunch options, and helps me shed pounds. Since I’ve taken up Couch to 5K, RunKeeper’s been a useful way to track my workouts, too. Sleep Cycle doesn’t help me get out of bed, which is a problem, but I think it’s me, more than the app. These stay.
It’s the other data that I’m wondering if I need. Moves, for example, lets me know all the places I go during the day. I can see my travels on a map, day in and day out. And there’s not a whole lot of variation. I go to work, I go to lunch, I go home. That’s because I’m a 9-to–5ing Corporate Stooge. Before going with Fitbit, Moves did serve as a great pedometer, but now that feature is quadruply redundant between the Fitbit app, MyFitnessPal, DayOne for iPhone, and Reporter app tracking my steps. (Plus, there’s the whole Facebook thing.) As it stands, Moves is just one more thing sucking up battery. Deleted.
Swarm is another location-tracking app without the automation of Moves. Before it was spun out into its own app, Foursquare was worthwhile as a way to inspire me to find interesting spots and collect badges. As a stand-alone app, it’s lost its interest. With so few friends using Foursquare/Swarm, I don’t even get the social benefit of knowing where my friends are so I can hang out with them. I’ll know if I’ve been somewhere interesting, or important. Logging it publicly serves no useful purpose. I can always just write it down if I need to remember a great place. Gone.
RescueTime and Reporter are apps I’m using to keep track of how I spend my time on my devices. I’ve been using RescueTime on my Mac for a while, and my weekly emails are sobering. (I spent how many hours on Facebook? Even one is too many!) However, it doesn’t track what I do at work—there’s a Windows version, but I don’t think IT would like it if I installed it—so RescueTime is only useful for figuring out how much time I spend on personal projects. I’m still working on ways to ensure I do that. Reporter is a new piece of software that buzzes me to log a few pieces of data: “Am I working?”, “What am I doing?”, and “What iPhone app did I use last?” (For my own curiosity. The big winner is Tweetbot, so far.) There are more pointed questions I could use it to ping me about, but I’m still working out whether this is even going to be something useful. Not Sure Yet.
As for the rest? Lift is a habit tracking app that works best when I actually think to open it. I’ve had an on-again, off-again relationship with the app, and I’m in the middle of giving it another chance. The social features are good for positive reinforcement, but I’m still unsure about it. Mint is actually very helpful, especially since I’ll be renting an apartment again and need to keep a closer eye on my finances. Last.fm? I’m of two minds on it… it’s a great way to discover new music, but I rarely think to check there when I’m looking for something new. I think it’ll have to go, despite years of use. I’m just not getting anything out of it, and don’t want to bother. Baleeted.
Before I dive into another service that automatically tracks some aspect of my life, I need to ask myself more questions about why I’m bothering. What do I want to know about myself? What am I trying to change? What happens if I’m successful, and what happens if I’m not? To just dive in and expect that some sort of pattern or sense will emerge from all the data I’m collecting about myself. That’s magical thinking. The same magical thinking that goes into big data, that enough data can overcome our own ignorance and biases.
Part of the problem is the “set it and forget it” nature of many of these services. Unobtrusiveness is important when you’re spying on yourself, but you still need to see what you’re collecting and decide if it’s of any use. I’m not trying to be Nicholas Felton, I just want to have a better sense of how I’m spending my time, money, and energy. I want to use this information to help me focus on the things that make me happy, and not to do more work, but do better work. It feels odd to just drop the bomb and wipe out years of data on where I’ve been and what music I’ve heard. Yet, I know the important things. My memories aren’t tied up in services, they’re in my head. For some things in life, that’s the only place they need to be.
The problem isn’t entrepreneurs, says Mr. Mundkur, it’s the venture capitalists who are funding them, which has led to a distortion of the way our society allocates capital.
Yatin Mundkur is proof that not all VCs are brainless. It’s a chicken and egg problem: tech companies are getting huge valuations, and huge buyouts. Venture capital funds get returns, and attract investors who want big gains, so the money goes into whatever looks like the safest bet for a big return. As long as Google, Facebook, et al., keep snapping up companies for stupid high valuations, the more returns the venture capital funds get, and the more investors allocate.
The result? Inflated valuations for companies doing extremely dumb consumer stuff with hockey stick growth in eyeballs, and luxury services for the technological elite. Meanwhile interesting, important, and longer-term stuff sits and struggles to attract money and attention. Venture capital should be picking up the slack where federal science funding is being cut and solving real problems. Instead, we have the current situation.
[W]hen we think about what technology wants, it makes sense to think of the agency involved. Who is the technology for?
Back in the 1990, Steve Jobs described the personal computer as a “bicycle for the mind.” At the risk of hagiography, Jobs’s vision is an inherently humanist one, where technology exists for the primary benefit of its user. We could argue about whether Apple’s meeting that high standard, but they’re the closest of the big technology companies. Google attempts to justify its collection of data with services like Google Now that process it and return it to you in smartly timed, digestible chunks. The goal of Google Now is to make you more comfortable with giving Google more and more information about you. My own experience with Google Now left me thinking that I wasn’t getting my data’s worth.
Is the technology we use designed for us, or for someone else? I think back to Jessica Ferris’s piece on quitting Facebook because of a stalker, and how her experience conflicts so strongly with Facebook’s basic value proposition. That is, Facebook is the place where you connect with your friends—people you know and care about. By having a huge network of people, and being able to connect you to the people you know, you benefit. By having a huge network of people interacting, they benefit by gaining data.
But, we might not want to connect with someone we know. In personal relationships, transparency isn’t always the goal. We have aspects of ourselves from people, but Facebook isn’t about hiding. It’s about collecting our data. In that sense, Facebook isn’t for us—it’s for the advertisers who want to know who we know, what we like, and where we go, so as to better target ads to us. And that is based on the assumption that the ads they’re targeting even work. Facebook presents the facade of being for us, but it’s not hard to find places where that facade is falling off to reveal the truth. They reveal it at their developer conferences each year.
Who is our technology for? That depends on the technology, and its creators. As it stands, a growing amount of it is for someone other than the person who’s going to be using it the most. It’s for advertisers, VC investors, and the technological elite with money to burn and little incentive to think of anything other than how to maximize their take. If users have lost agency over technology, if it’s no longer for us, part of why is our fault for surrendering our agency willingly. It’s as much our fault as those who have seized the opportunity to exploit it, be those exploiters Google, Facebook, or the NSA.
Rich Mogull, over at Macworld, wrote a great piece about how Apple actually cares about users privacy. It's a great read, and Rich pulls together a few solid facts to support a theory I've had for a while about trusting my data to Apple. Namely, that Apple doesn't make any money from selling me out (iAds excluded). They're making enough money on hardware that services like iCloud can be included gratis, without paying in data.
It's also worrisome. Apple is very much a luxury brand. The Apple Tax is a real thing, and even with the recent price drop on the 11" MacBook Air, you can get a full-featured Windows laptop for less, with a bigger screen. While the security conscious smartphone Blackphone may not occupy a luxury niche, and is a bit rough around the edges, it's not available through any carrier with a subsidy. This means a privacy-minded user would have to cough up $629 minimum for a secure phone.
In other words, if you're cost conscious, you can't afford to be privacy conscious.
Competing with free is always a difficult proposition. You can push on the privacy aspects like with Microsoft's “Scroogled” campaign, but that $0 price tag is so awfully tempting. People will sign on that dotted line without a care in the world what they're giving up, so long as it's free. Google and Facebook are masters of consumer psychology in that regard, offering compelling, quality web services for the price of data. Which, if you understand the Faustian bargain you're getting into, isn't so bad.
We already know, however, that most people don't know. Or, if they do, they don't bother to do anything to limit access. Part of why Windows PCs are often so much cheaper than comparable Apple hardware is not just cheaper components and volume pricing, but because they often come pre-loaded with privacy killing crapware that hardware manufacturers are paid for. Short of reinstalling the operating system as the first step in setting up a new machine, there's little that can be done to stop this practice.
I worry that we're heading for a new class divide in technology, where the poor, the cost-conscious, or the apathetic are surrendering more than they think. Meanwhile, those of us in our high-price luxury computing world—centered around Apple—can avoid the privacy crushing juggernauts. Are Apple users going to be the digital Eloi to an Internet of Morlocks? Not any time soon. There's enough Apple users who happily tie into Google's web services (author included) that it's not going to change overnight. But Apple making the slightly more privacy conscious Bing the default search in Yosemite and iOS 8—and adding the private search engine DuckDuckGo as an option could be the start of a trend.
Facebook should have made it impossible for someone who loves me to have unknowingly put me at such risk. Facebook should have made it impossible for me to unknowingly put myself at such risk. But that wasn’t a priority. What I was taking for granted as just the way things were was actually just the way Facebook wanted things to be.
With all the fuss about Facebook’s experimenting on users emotions—an experiment that’s not even an original idea.—it’s easy to lose sight of the other ways Facebook screws with us. Of course Facebook removed the ability to keep your friends list private in 2009. It did this because the more connections you make, the more data you give Facebook. The Facebook algorithms don’t care if you’re connecting with your best friend from Kindergarten, or an amoral stalker. It just cares that you connect.