A perfectly
normal
Tuesday

You wore the smartwatch all night. That was intentional — sleep tracking. The watch recorded: when you fell asleep, how long you spent in each sleep phase, your heart rate during sleep, your skin temperature, your stress level via heart rate variability.

This data does not stay on the device. It travels to the manufacturer's cloud — almost nothing is stored locally. Which cloud depends on which watch you wear:

Regardless of which watch: the data leaves your wrist. It ends up either in the USA or in China.

You just wanted to know whether you slept well.

Ten minutes on Instagram before the day really begins. Google Timeline is already logging your location — the time, the position, the device. This happens regardless of whether you are actively doing anything.

Instagram shows you posts. You scroll. What you look at, for how long, what you skipped, what you looked at twice — all of it is stored. Including posts you did not like.

Google Maps is running, or you simply have your phone with you. Google Timeline records: 7:38, nursery. 7:52, primary school. Every Tuesday. For years.

You never actively shared this. You just had your phone with you.

You message a friend on WhatsApp. The content is encrypted — end-to-end. Meta cannot read it.

But Meta still knows: you wrote to someone this morning. Exactly when. How long the conversation lasted. From which location. Who communicates with whom, when, how often, from where — that is metadata. And metadata is available without limit.

Quickly opened Amazon, searched, found something. Pay with PayPal because it's faster. Three clicks, done.

Amazon now knows: you buy gifts. You buy for specific age groups. Your purchase history stretches back years and paints a precise picture — from children's clothing sizes to household items to medicines.

Lunchtime shopping. Children's yoghurt, vegetables, cold remedy tea, vitamin supplements, a children's magazine. At the checkout: loyalty card.

The loyalty programme stores: which store you visited. What you bought. The exact price. The time. With 28 million active users in Germany, Payback is the third most used card after debit and credit cards.

Savings today: 37 cents.

In the Play Store: a game for the kids, £2.99. Paid with Google Pay.

Google Pay stores: name, address, phone number, device ID, purchase history. In 2018, Google acquired transaction data from Mastercard to link online behaviour with real-world purchasing behaviour.

A lullaby on YouTube. Perhaps the third time this week, always on Tuesdays or Thursdays.

Google stores: what was played. For how long. When. YouTube is a Google service. Usage behaviour feeds into the same profile that has been growing since morning.

Pizza. Tuesdays, this happens quite often.

The delivery app knows: your name, your address, your favourite restaurant, the time, the frequency. This creates a profile: when you are too tired to cook. Whether you order for one or for several. Whether it tends to be weekdays or weekends.

Amazon Fire TV Stick. A series, perhaps a film.

Amazon records: what you started, what you abandoned, what you searched for beforehand, which platforms you used, when the device was last active.

In the living room. In the kitchen.

After the wake word, everything audible is recorded and transmitted to a US cloud — including background noise, the voices of guests and children who may not know they are being recorded.

The smartwatch keeps running. It notices when your heartbeat grows quieter. When you fall asleep. By tomorrow morning, the server will know more about this night than you do.