Surveillance Project Diary :

11 / 30 – Monday :
Today I burned 505 calories. I exercised for 18 minutes by walking my dog luna and walked 9,372 steps. I climbed nine flights of stairs by going upstairs to my bedroom. I found a new element that my apple watch tracks. My apple watch tracks how fast I go up the stairs. Today I walked up the stairs at a range of 1.3-1.9 ft /s. I stood up for at least one minute for 15 hours. I also walked approximately 4.3 miles. My heart rate range was from 72-84 BPM. The sound levels around me ranged from 36 – 81 dB. Today was a pretty active day for me, although I could not work out as much as I would like. Beginning this project, I cannot help but weigh the positives and negatives of allowing others or the government to have access to my health data. Like Mia in Juli Zeh’s The Method, I find myself more reluctant to allow the government to use my health data for “research purposes” because I am not optimistic that that is really what it is being used for.

12 / 1 – Tuesday :
Today I found many new features on my apple watch: resting calories, the time I stood, resting heart rate, step length, and walking speed. Many of these features that I discovered today reminded me of new surveillance and how, in our modern age, we can have items such as apple watches that work with our senses and cognition. I burned 461 calories and burned 1,422 resting calories. I exercised for 21 minutes and walked approximately 4.1 miles. I also completed 8,954 steps. I stood up at least one minute for 15 hours and stood for a total of 125 minutes. I had three classes, which is why I did not stand up much throughout the day. My environmental sound levels ranged from 32 – 102 dB. My heart rate range was from 62 – 149 BPM with a peak of 149 at 4-5 pm, probably because my mom told me dinner was ready, and I got excited. My resting heart rate was 80 BPM, and my walking heart rate was 119 BPM. My step length was 26.4 inches, which surprised me a lot since I am 5’2. My walking speed was 3.1 mph and how fast I walked up the stairs was 1.6 ft /s. Today I was less active than yesterday, but considering I have three classes on Tuesdays, I feel as though I was productive

12/2 – Wednesday:
Today my apple watch tracked that I burned a total of 401 calories. It showed that I exercised for 16 minutes and stood for one minute in 14 hours. I took a total of 7,159 steps and walked for around 3.2 miles. In total, I stood for 120 minutes along with climbing 12 floors. I had 1,426 resting calories, my average heart rate at about 111 beats per minute. My environmentally sound levels were similar to the day before, being at 32-93 dB. My resting heart rate averaged 71 BPM. With my step length being 18.9-29.1 inches, my daily speed ranged between 1.9-3.7 mph. Today I checked my settings to see where all of my data was going. I was happy to find out that I do not allow my data off my apple watch to be shared with other apps or used for research purposes. I feel as though only seeing myself through my Apple watch’s eyes that I often caught myself appearing as just a number in a system, which made me feel a bit odd since my apple watch is supposed to be personalized to me.

12/3 – Thursday :
Today I burned 401 calories and burned a total of 1,477 resting calories. I exercised for 16 minutes, which is lower than usual. I traveled 3.2 miles and completed a total of 7,197 steps. I stood up for at least one minute for 15 hours and stood for 90 minutes. I was not happy at the amount of time I was sitting today, but I guess that’s what comes with all of my online classes. I climbed 14 flights of stairs. Today I noted that my watch calculated both my speed going up and down the stairs. My rate down the stairs ranged from 1.1 – 1.6 ft/s while my pace up the stairs was 1.6 ft /s. My environmental sound levels ranged from 32 – 95 dB. My heart rate went from 54 – 144 BPM with a resting heart rate of 68 BPM. My walking heart rate was 68 BPM, considering I barely walked today, and my walking speed was very slow at 1.6 – 3.2 mph. My step length was 18.5 – 28. 7 inches. Today was not a very active day, but it probably means I was super studious. Throughout the day, I was reminded of how surveillance is an exercise of power and how when we are surveilling ourselves, we often take away the control that the government has over us as Hasan M. Elahi did his “Tracking Transience” throughout his day through pictures.

12/4 – Friday :
Today my apple watch tracked that I burned 456 calories and had a total of 1,490 resting calories. I exercised for 30 minutes and was pretty active, and traveled 3.9 miles. I took 8,769 steps and stood up one minute in 14 hours, and stood for 113 minutes. My heart rate ranged from 61 – 151 BPM and rested at approximately 79 BPM. My walking heart rate was 113 BPM. Today I climbed 19 flights of stairs, and my speed up the stairs was 0.92 – 1.6 ft /s, which was lower than usual, and my pace down the stairs was 1.2 ft /s. My environmental sound levels stayed approximately the same as it has been for the past couple of days at 32 – 93 dB. I found another new feature on my watch that calculated how far I walked in six minutes, and it said in six minutes I walked 500m. My walking speed averaged 1.4 – 3.6 mph, and my step length was approximately 16.9 – 31.9 inches, which was larger than usual. Overall, it appeared that I had a pretty active day.

12/5 – Saturday :
For Saturday, I burned a total of 438 calories while exercising for 22 minutes. I took a total of 7,201 steps, totally out to be around 3.3 miles. I had 1,498 resting calories with my resting heart rate at 71 beats per minute. I stood for a total of 102 minutes and climbed ten flights of stairs with my stair speed up being between .85-1.3 feet per second and my stair speed down being 1.9 feet per second. My stair speed up was a little slower than usual. My environmental sound levels were 32-107 dB, and my heart rate ranged between 66-147 beats per minute. My walking speed ranged between 2.1- 4.2 mph, being the fact that I went out with friends and walked around town. My step length for the day was considerably longer than usual, between 19.7-35.8 inches, slightly raising my average walking heart rate to 118 beats per minute. Overall, I had an eventful day but am super excited to head into the last week of school and be done.

12/6 – Sunday :
Today was a great day because I am finally done recording myself, I’m just kidding. It was a great day because I went Christmas shopping for my mom. I burned a total of 426 calories and burned a total of 1,376 resting calories. I walked 4 miles and completed 16 minutes of exercise. I met 8,917 steps, and my step length was 26 inches. I stood up at least one minute for 13 hours but stood up for a total of 129 minutes. I climbed nine floors, and my speed up the stairs was 1.4 ft/s, and my pace down the stairs was 1.3 ft/s. My heart rate was 96 BPM when I collected this data and varied 24 ms. My resting heart rate was 76 BPM, and my walking heart rate was 120 BPM. My walking speed was 2.4 mph. My environmental sound levels were 38 – 110 dB, with a peak of 110 at 9-10 pm, possibly due to my dog barking. Today I found a new feature called walking asymmetry. Walking asymmetry is used to see how well you’re walking by taking both the left and right sides of your body. My walking asymmetry was 3.4 %, and I believe that healthy walking asymmetry is 5 %, so I need to do better walking evenly. After collecting data for a week on myself, I have realized that if I do not complete specific goals such as exercising each day, I often feel inadequate and let that get into my head. Users need to realize that your data does not define you as a person and your identity.

Reflection :
In recent years, Apple came out with its first Apple Watch. The Apple Watch can track your exercise, heart rate, environmental sound levels, and much more. Like myself, many people were fascinated by the Apple Watch and its capabilities and purchased the watch. For a week, I tracked my activity through my Apple Watch to explore my data that the watch was tracking. Throughout the week, I found many new features on my watch that I didn’t know existed and played with my settings to see who was accessing the data from my watch.

There are many elements of our lives that we monitor. From our heart rate, running pace, sleep patterns, or step count, we are continually surveillancing ourselves. According to Live Science, the quantified self refers to the “increasing use of technology to collect data about oneself” (Rettner). Through this project, I understood private versus public information and the importance of being aware of who is accessing data that you plan to keep secret. I was also able to know how through surveillancing yourself, you often take away the power that the government has over you as Hasan M. Elahi did in his “Tracking Transcience” through always documenting elements of his life like the food he ate, flights he was on, and much more. Through this, Elahi was able to take power away from the government and back to himself. In many ways, throughout the week, I felt that surveillancing myself allowed me to feel like I was in charge of my data. As I explored my Apple Watch, I was made aware of many aspects of my watch that would be considered new surveillance and how these new technologies could be beneficial to us and harmful at the same time.

On my Apple Watch, I mainly measured my activity throughout the day, including calories burned, how long I stood up, how many steps I took, my heart rate, and much more. I chose to measure this because I was interested to see how my activity changed over the week and to see what factors in my life played into my mobility and movement. For example, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I would often note that I had significantly fewer minutes that I stood. I concluded that this was more than likely because I have three classes on both Tuesdays and Thursdays. Therefore I am less active on those days of the week.
My observation of myself was to understand my Apple Watch and understand where my data is going. Before beginning this experiment, I did not know many of the features of my Apple watch. For example, I was unaware of the element that measures my Environmental Sound Levels and how that, in a way, means that my Apple Watch is listening to everything that is going on around me. On the second day of my experiment, I checked my settings to see where my data collected from my watch was going. I was relieved to find out that my settings were that I did not allow any other apps to access my data, and I did not allow for my data to be used for research purposes.

The knowledge that I planned to gain throughout the experiment was seeing what patterns my activity took over the week and what similarities I could draw from day to day. I also planned to gain knowledge from Apple by seeing how accurate I felt the data collected. In some instances, I often would move my arm that my watch was on, and it would count that movement as me exercising when I was not. I will go into more detail about this later.

The data my watch collected was generally valuable to me. In some instances, I felt as though some data was more useful than others. For example, my step count was less helpful because it is merely just a number, in my opinion. The data that was more valuable to me featured such as my heart rate and my data patterns over a period of time because that data is much more personal to me and, in my opinion, is my private data. I know that I found myself feeling like a statistic rather than a real human being in many cases, but I was also aware of the importance of protecting what I felt was my private data.
Overall, I was pretty satisfied with the data that my Apple Watch collected. I enjoyed exploring all of the different features that the watch had to offer and was amazed at just how advanced the technology was from a small item. As I stated above, my data was not shared with any other apps or used for research purposes, but I imagine that Apple may use the data without telling us, which would not surprise me. Throughout the week, I contemplated the benefits and the negatives of using the Apple Watch. Many of the services I found were that you could track an array of elements of your life and set daily goals for yourself. For example, my everyday goal is to burn 400 calories, and that goal motivates me to be active throughout my day. In many instances, I was reminded of a specific quote from Juli Zeh’s The Method. Zeh states, “The Method was developed so that every individual can enjoy maximum longevity and minimal biological dysfunction – or put simply, a happy and healthy life, a life free from suffering and pain” (29). Although there are many benefits to having the data readily available to us, we run the risk of becoming addicted to the data and getting too wrapped up in our data, and allowing it to affect our mental health. I often find myself getting upset when I do not exercise enough and find that affecting my mental health, and that is something that needs to be considered when collecting all of this data about ourselves.

Although I used my Apple Watch, other group members utilized apps that tracked their sleep or tracked their speed while driving. I found that interesting because we all chose different apps that displayed that there is so much potential data that could be collected under the quantified self. In general, I believe that most of the group was shocked at the amount of possible data our electronic devices could collect without us even being aware of it. Overall, through this project, I gained a better understanding of private versus public data, the mental health risk of this data, and just the amount of data collected on us. Through this experiment, I felt as though I realized just how powerful surveillance is and how often those who surveillance others often possess power over whom they are surveilling. The aspect of control regarding surveillance is essential and is something that we need to look out for as our world continues to progress and increase its technology.

Works Cited
Elahi, Hasan M. Tracking Transience v2.2, elahi.gmu.edu/track/.
Rettner, Rachael. What Is the Quantified Self? 26 Aug. 2013,
www.livescience.com/39185-quantified-self-movement.html.
Zeh, Juli, and Sally-Ann Spencer. The Method. Vintage Books, 2014.