Today Google sent me a Timeline for 2023. My impulse was to delete it unopened, but I am sidelined with a rotator cuff injury, so I read it, and then I had many questions.

How does Google track me? My guess is via my Android phone, though my Fitbit tracker may also play a role. I usually have both items with me. I don’t have Location enabled on my Macbook, though I do use the Google chrome browser.

My meager travels show me as a committed bicoaster, with a swath through northern California and into Nevada, and a smudge in NJ/PA. For the first time in years, there were no trips to Texas, though we plan to return there in April of this year. The NoCal/Nevada and East Coast forays represent a single trip each. Among Santa Cruzans, I stand out because of weekly road trips to San Francisco, East Bay, or Silicon Valley, which many locals shun, but by the standards of the coastal urban crowd we abandoned eight years ago, I am a committed homebody.

I walked 142 miles in 57 hours, which seems quite low for a year. Fitbit has two tracking concepts related to walking: a Walk, defined as at least 20 minutes of continuous walking or walking-like movement (international dancing registers this way) and Steps, theoretically the number of steps I take each day, although this counter can be affected by piano playing or shelf-stocking. I usually get 10,000 Steps per day, but if there is not an official Walk (or Run, Aerobics workout, Bike trip, Yoga class, or Weights session) Fitbit will credit me with zero Exercise on that day. So I’m not sure whether the cumulative Google walk number is based on Fitbit Walks or just on walking.

I walk well over an hour per week, in fact, most days I walk more than an hour per day, though not always in 20-minute continuous increments.

I drove–or was driven?–9747 miles in 431 hours, an average of 22 mph. The mileage seems right for my car, Hachi, but of course I also ride in my husband’s Mustang, and both ride and drive in various vehicles associated with The Marine Mammal Center. The speed seems about right for around-town travel but I feel like I spend most of my driving time on the highway. On longish trips, including my frequent TMMC runs to Half Moon Bay and any half-hour or longer trip around the Bay area, I put my phone into airplane mode; do those miles “count?” The 4-day Nevada trip alone was conservatively 900 miles round-trip, or a tenth of the total, which seems like two large a proportion for four days.

I traveled a total of 15,034 miles, so the other 5145 miles must have been on the plane trip to Newark. That total is 60% of the distance around the world, which is hilarious, since I mostly did not go anywhere. Now I want to see Timelines for some of my more itinerant friends and relatives. I’ve got to be in the bottom 1% for annual travel distance this year.

I spent 476 hours shopping in 28 places. That is even more hilarious, because I HATE shopping, and I am very confident I did not spend 9 hours/week shopping last year. You may already think you know the answer, which is that I work in a retail store 16 hours/week, but that would give me 800 hours this year for work alone. So this number is a real mystery. How can it know that I am shopping other than by figuring out when I am inside a store? Plus sometimes I shop online, could it be tracking that?

Working, BTW, is one of my activities for which Fitbit registers lots of Steps but no Exercise.

I spent 60 hours eating out at 34 places. Now admittedly I do try to minimize eating out, which in almost all cases involves significant exposure to toxic or inflammatory substances with little nutritive value. But when I do eat out, it’s always at a slow-food restaurant, and it’s usually an event of at least an hour, and I can name some restaurants I visited more than once this year. On our two trips we ate out every meal, so that’s about 20 restaurant meals right there. Averaging five hours/month seems a little low, too, though not crazy low.

I used the terms seems and feel a lot. Maybe I should just accept these values as reality and ignore my own perceptions? I sometimes make fun of people who are confused by data; am I one? One way to find out would be to try to track these things myself and compare results. I am definitely not planning to spend any time doing that.

After scrutinizing this Timeline, I am less concerned about the accuracy with which our corporate overlords can track us, but more concerned about using this information to make any policy decisions or societal conclusions whatsoever.