Social Data / Chatting
In my day-to-day, I would guess that I am producing the most information through this category of activity. I have multiple active group chats on WhatsApp, which can leave breadcrumbs about my location and activity calendar (when/where I am messaging more frequently). I also use messenger on Android, which I imagine collects similar bits of data though in a less secure environment.
For work and school, I set up my MIT email to work through my personal gmail account for convenience. Our department’s computer team tells me that this means Google reads all of my emails now. My lab and another student group I work with communicate over Slack; they are not the most active but I do check them regularly throughout the day.
The last set of communication channels worth mentioning are Instagram and Reddit. I posted a neighborhood-tagged photo on instagram that morning, which of course provided some location data as well as information on some of my tastes, which I’m sure instagram takes in concert with the things I like to target more and more effective ads into my feed. On Reddit, I mostly read (rather than comment) but the subreddits I follow probably paint a pretty detailed picture of my online interest profile.
Moving Around
I’ve been using Bluebike to get around lately while I put off some bike repairs until it gets warmer. Because it’s a docking system, they collect my start/end points as we saw in the data we explored a few classes back, as well as the information attached to my subscription through MIT. I plan trips using the app Citymapper, so they get more granular information about my trips.
I was good about packing coffee/food today, so I didn’t pay for anything with my credit card — though on a normal day there would at least be some data on my caffeine, lunch, or afternoon snack habits around my neighborhood and/or campus.
As I moved around, the Fit app on android tracked my steps and my location.
Getting Online
I primarily use chrome for my web browsing because it makes it easy to pick things up across machines and between my phone and my computer. Most of the group projects I am on work between Dropbox and the Google Drive suite of products (often both).
I used the MIT VPN from my apartment to get access to research materials online through the library, requiring my MIT ID. I used google scholar to help in researching which articles would be useful, leaving behind information about both my work and my interests
Other Things
I use an alarm clock app that (supposedly) tracks my sleep cycles to help wake me up at easier times, which means that there’s some behavioral data being collected even in my sleep.
I opt-in to sending analytics for many of the sofware that I have on my laptop, which likely means that my usage of things like adobe creative cloud registers somewhere in their analytics platform.