I know this is 2019 and we spend half our time signing little online waivers about cookies and ‘personal data’ and how it won’t be shared, divided, used against us in a court of law, sold to third parties, especially the Labour Party. But we don’t think about that. You can’t access that link or newspaper article or recipe or football review, without ‘accepting terms and conditions’. But…

Google are following me.

Everywhere. Whither I goest, they shall ride in my wake. It’s like the imaginary friend you never wanted. It’s like a team of detectives stalking you. It is fucking Big Brother in the worst Orwellian way. My phone is not ‘smart’, it is ‘KGB’. But not quite as brutal. Yet. How long before it starts to actually punish us for misdemeanours? Give us a 12-volt jig for breaking the speed limit? Digs a needle in your leg for looking at that girl’s legs? Shutting itself down for 10 minutes because you ‘liked’ a photo of Prince Andrew?

But getting an email telling me precisely how far I’ve walked, cycled and driven for the last month, which countries I visited, for how long, the cities I’ve seen and how often I stopped for a piss on the way (very often, FYI), I find very scary. They ARE watching me and although they didn’t say how much hummus I’d eaten (ever such a lot) that’s probably coming later along with how many times I’ve visited doctors, parked on yellow lines and sworn at slouching pedestrians and phone zombies during the course of walking 42 miles.

This is an infringement of my neuman rights! Which are like human rights but a bit more ‘Mad’ magazine.

I walk at 3 miles per hour. Not bad. As an average. Though I cycle at 9mph. But drive, or be driven at 14mph? They must have been following the wrong person. My car only starts at 55 and that’s down the (rather short) driveway.

So yes, there is a mild interest in the data provided, but you have to question their facility in gaining it. I didn’t ask for an analysis, I didn’t know they were doing it (though that’s my ignorance, obvs) and it makes the paranoid within me wonder what else they know. Spending patterns is easy. Harder to follow those with Mel due to ‘sheer volume of traffic’.

We leave a trace as we innocently lead our private lives. And these mutherfuckas pick it up and throw it right in our faces. Then sell it to Cambridge Analytica who will make me vote Labour.

Concerned of NW11

A xxxx