Reader’s Digest UK – August 2019

(Chris Devlin) #1
READER’S DIGEST

depressingly, three nose and ear
trimmers, each more expensive than
the last. In literally seconds, you get a
pretty accurate picture of an early
middle-aged, middle-class, cat-
owning dad who lives in the London
green-belt, drinks too much and
desperately wants to trim his nose hair.
You can, if you so choose, delete
such entries from your Google
profile, one by one—but you can’t
prevent Gmail collecting more.
I found myself feeling as I had that


AUGUST 2019 • 19

“In seconds, you get an


accurate picture of a


middle-aged, middle-


class, cat-owning Dad


who drinks too much”


night in Woodstock: ruffled,
unsettled, yet reluctantly impressed.
Gmail’s file on me goes back to 2011,
when I bought an Elliot Smith CD—
back in the days when I still had a
CD player, natch!
The subsequent data
demonstrates that I’ve got a
mortgage, a son, a Mini Cooper, a
dead dad and pimped-up set of
garden furniture. All rather
revealing. But most users don’t even
realise this archive exists; still less
look back through it to see what
digital footprints they’ve left behind.
Oddly, I can’t bring myself to
delete the records; I think because,
in a sad way, this chronicle of
consumerism is now the closest
thing I have to a journal, or an
archive of letters. I haven’t written
one of those... since I joined Gmail. n

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