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There was also a lot of “data exhaust,” as the security technologist Matt Mitchell calls it, a polite term for the record of my life rendered in Google searches, from a 2011 query for karaoke bars in Washington, D.C., to a more recent search for the closest Chuck E. Cheese.

Google’s scientists learned how to extract predictive metadata from this “data exhaust” and use it to analyze likely patterns of future behavior.

It feels like 99 percent of the time when people are talking data exhaust, retention, what’s your footprint, it’s in the context of corporate cybersecurity, maintaining the status quo.

Corporations gain access to the minutiae and intimate details of daily life when we enter our behaviors into self-tracking devices, acquiring our data for free—something scholars call “data exhaust.”

The problem is not data breaches: it is “data exhaust”, the information that is produced as a byproduct of our digital lives.