Call them what you will: personal information repositories, personal databases, advanced digital profiles, smart assistant hoard piles. No matter what you choose or what you allow Google, Microsoft or Apple to label them, they are coming and in a big way. I have been into this stuff for a very long time and I have been saving screenshots of what I look at online since the mid 90s and there are many reasons why I have done this. I have to tip my hat to Apple in the early days because they put the snapshot sound into the Command-Shift-3 keyboard shortcut but Windows ran alongside them with the practical functionality built into most keyboards with Print Screen.
Why would someone want to even bother with screenshots now after she spent 20 years not using them? Because personal digital assistants are going to want this information to create more advanced recommendations. Of course they don’t need this information but why would you want to starve your digital assistant(s)? You want them healthy and happy just like you want your kids, right?
Keystroke loggers have been around for centuries and videogame walkthroughs have been around for about 10 years or so in their more detailed form. It is just a matter of time before people leave the digital logging switch set to “ON” continuously. There are a lot of reasons why this will eventually be a good idea. I would love to explore these in detail sometime but for now I will just drop ref to the changes I just found with Firefox and Pocket. I really like what they are doing but I don’t think that it will go viral with mainstream adoption. It could if they do insanely simple things like put dates next to the items saved in Pocket. As things usually go, Microsoft and Google are already in this space and are doing things like automatic OCR of images. Even if Pocket-Firefox were to create a cute, little personal API for personal digital data, you would have to link it back to Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive for handy search functionality..
https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/13/17446660/mozilla-firefox-pocket-recommendations-ceo-nate-weiner-interview-converge-podcast
