Six months after I started using MOVES and LARK, I opened my phone one day and saw a notification: “You only had 47 minutes of deep sleep last night, 23% below your monthly average. We recommend reducing caffeine intake today.”

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I paused for a moment. Not because the advice was so astonishing — but because I myself had no idea I’d only gotten 47 minutes of deep sleep the night before. I only knew that I felt a little tired when I woke up, but without that notification, I probably would have downed a cup of coffee as usual and headed out the door.

An app understood my body better than I did.

This made me start thinking about a question: when a system understands you better than you understand yourself, where exactly is “you”?

A Quantified Life

Let me list the things these apps already knew back then:

What time I fell asleep and woke up each day, and how my sleep cycles were distributed. How many steps I took in a day, how far I ranged, which places I frequented. Activity tracking that once required deliberate planning was now being continuously collected in a completely natural, almost painless state.

Add in social media data, and the system also knew what topics I’d recently been following, who I interacted with most frequently, what time I posted most often, and what kinds of content most easily caught my attention.

In the future, if there were an app that could analyze where I held meetings, who I interacted with, how long each meeting lasted, and the changes in my post-meeting output — that wouldn’t be surprising at all. In fact, by 2026, such tools already exist.

All this data gathered together forms a “THE ONE” — a comprehensive system encompassing your physiology, behavior, social life, and cognition. Your digital footprint is the raw material that feeds this system.

The Algorithm Knows You Better Than You Know Yourself

This brings several harsh realities.

I might not know my true work efficiency, but the system does. It can calculate how many words I produce in a week, how many hours of meetings I attend, how long my focused work periods last. I subjectively feel “very busy,” but the data might tell me: you only spend 30% of your time on genuinely productive things; the rest is spent switching tasks and replying to messages.

My understanding of my own sleep and health is very likely inferior to the data from wearable devices. I feel like I sleep okay, but my Apple Watch says my heart rate variability is declining, indicating accumulating stress.

My assessment of my own social influence is absolutely inferior to the data the platforms are already tallying for me — weekly reach, engagement rate, follower growth curve.

In other words: the system has already constructed a “you” more precise than your own self-perception.

Is this a good thing or a bad thing?

The Tug-of-War Between Two Generations

For the internet-native generation, feeding their digital footprint to the system is natural. They grew up on social media, sharing their daily lives, tracking data, letting algorithms recommend content — as naturally as breathing. “Privacy,” for them, isn’t something to be protected, but something to be exchanged — trading some personal data for better service seems perfectly reasonable.

But for someone like me, who once lived in a “pre-internet era,” this is an enormous tug-of-war. I remember a world without smartphones. I remember the days when going out didn’t mean being tracked by GPS, socializing wasn’t sorted by algorithms, and sleeping wasn’t quantified by sensors.

We live in a time and space of overlapping paradigms. The old paradigm says: your life is private, and you have the right to decide what is seen and what is not. The new paradigm says: your life is data, and data only has value when shared.

The conflict between these two paradigms is not just a technical problem; it’s a philosophical debate about what it means to be human.

Redefining Privacy

What is privacy?

The traditional definition is: the right not to be known by others. Your diary is private, your medical records are private, what you do at home is private.

But in the age of digital footprints, this definition is no longer sufficient. Because a large part of your “private information” is information you yourself don’t know. You don’t know your own sleep patterns, you don’t know how your attention is distributed, you don’t know the psychological patterns behind your consumption behavior. But the system knows.

So the question becomes: do you have a right to privacy over information about yourself that you don’t even know?

This question sounds abstract, but it has very concrete consequences. If an insurance company uses your wearable device data to determine your premium, do you agree? If an employer uses your digital activity patterns to evaluate your work commitment, do you accept that? If a dating platform uses your behavioral data to decide whose profile you see, do you think that’s fair?

In “Facebook’s Algorithm and the Tug-of-War with Human Nature”, I explored the algorithm’s influence on human behavior. But the problem of digital footprints goes one layer deeper — it doesn’t just influence your behavior, it redefines what “you” is.

Boiling a Frog Slowly

When I first wrote down my thoughts on this in 2017, I used the metaphor of slowly boiling a frog. Nine years later, the water is very hot now, but we’re still in the pot.

Not because we don’t know the water is heating up, but because the cost of jumping out is too high — not using a smartphone? Not using social media? Not using wearable devices? Not using any digital services? In today’s society, that’s almost equivalent to withdrawing from civilization.

And the system does provide genuine value. My Apple Watch once alerted me to an abnormal heart rate, prompting me to get checked, which revealed a condition that needed attention. Without that alert, I might have ignored it. AI-recommended articles really have broadened my horizons. Navigation apps really do keep me from getting lost in unfamiliar cities.

So the question isn’t “to use or not to use” — that choice has already been made. The question is: under what conditions do we use it? Is the ratio of the exchange reasonable? Do we still retain the ability to say “no”?

A Posture for Coexisting with the Web

I don’t have the answer. I really don’t.

But I do have a posture: use it consciously, rather than being used numbly.

This means a few things. Know what you’re handing over — every time you install an app or agree to a privacy policy, what data are you handing over, to whom, and for what use? Know what the system is doing to you — why is the algorithm pushing this particular content at you? What is it optimizing for? What does it assume you want? And then, occasionally, give the system a surprise: deliberately search for things you wouldn’t normally search for, read perspectives you would skip, and let it get confused for a moment.

We may not be able to escape from this web. But we can at least choose: within the web, are we conscious beings, or passive sources of data?

I feel like a frog living in a pot of slowly heating water. Somewhat accustomed to it. Yet finding it somewhat strange. But at least, I know the water is heating up. And to know — that is the starting point of resistance.