The past few years have been a period of enlightenment into the state of our privacy and the programs that governments are running to aid in the surveillance process. I have been trying for some time to track my personal data to measure and gain insight into my own habits but have not found one that is entirely efficient and I think it comes down to automation. We are increasingly becoming accustomed to technology taking care of things for us and eventually most things will be.

For now, the app called PRISM, aptly named after the NSA spying program, is a great way to visualize a portion of your daily data, your text messages. I removed the names of my texting counterparts to maintain some anonymity, but it is easy to guess which colors may represent my closer friends or when I started seeing someone, when I stopped seeing that someone, etc.

These are the types of trends hidden in our personal data that the NSA has visibility to and which we should also be able to track.