Kennedy: Good luck with my phone facts

Mountain Arts Community Center is offering free smartphone workshops specifically for seniors.
Mountain Arts Community Center is offering free smartphone workshops specifically for seniors.

It turns out your smartphone apps have eagle eyes. And photographic memories, too.

Hence the scary headline earlier this week in The New York Times, "Your Apps Know Where You Are at Night, and They Are Not Keeping It a Secret."

Well, big whoop.

The gist of the article is that your phone uses GPS to track your movements, which ostensibly have some commercial value to companies that buy the info in order to determine your habits and sell you stuff.

photo Mark Kennedy

If the app companies can make money off the fact that I'm a homebody who goes to bed at 9:30 p.m., more power to them. I guess if you are a cat burglar or a serial philanderer, then you're worried. But for a guy whose idea of living on the edge is drinking 2 percent milk (instead of skim), bring on the wire taps.

In fact, I'll do you one better. I will give the phone chasers a freebie. Here, without embellishment, is a record of my movements for last Sunday. I'll even throw in my precious, private consumer purchasing information.

» 9:45 a.m. Off to Sunday School. My Sunday School class is part small group, part confessional. Last week we went around the room telling stories about the Christmas season.

I told about how my dad always made a recipe with orange slices and coconut that he called "ambrosia" and that everybody in the family hated it, except him.

Somebody else told about buying neti pots for their kids one Christmas.

"One to share, or did each kid get their own?" said a smart-alec who sounded a lot like me.

Another class member told how they accidentally threw out some murky baptismal water once, only to discover it had been imported by the preacher from the River Jordan on his trip to the Holy Land.

Oops.

» 11:45 a.m. I drove to our neighborhood convenience store to squirt air in my wife's tires. I used six quarters and was happy not to have exceeded my four minutes of compressed air. I filled them all to 34 psi, but the warning light did not reset.

I actually felt good about this mission because it reminded me that the car is paid for, and therefore I don't feel compelled to get it fixed. I can put a piece of tape over the "improper inflation" tire light and continue not having a car payment.

You people inside my phone: Please do not interpret this as a sign I want/need a new car. I do not. As an automotive journalist, I test-drive a new car every week. I am impervious to "new car" smell. In fact, I hate it. Put that in your app and smoke it.

» 12:30 p.m. Off to Walmart. Shopping list: frozen pizza, mouthwash, Craisins, apples, green leaf lettuce, Trix cereal, Yoplait blueberry yogurt and Kind bars. Oh, and Sleepytime tea.

Note to makers of Sleepytime tea: We consumers do not need 12 different kinds of Sleepytime tea. Especially not: Sleepytime Echinacea Complete Care Wellness. Come on, complete wellness? I feel like this overpromises. One or two Sleepytime tea varieties would be plenty. Your competitor, Nighty Night tea (I am not making this name up), has fewer flavors and may ultimately earn our business.

You people inside my phone: That's why I spent seven minutes Sunday standing in one spot in Walmart. Not a mini-stroke.

» 3:30 p.m. Off to the movies. Drove all the way from Signal Mountain to East Ridge to see "Green Book" - an excellent buddy movie about race relations in the 1960s South. I drove to East Ridge because that's the only place in the city it was playing. Had I wanted to see "Ralph Breaks the Internet," on the other hand, I had my choice of dozens of screens in seven theaters. People inside my phone: Fix this problem please.

View other columns by Mark Kennedy

Purchases: Movie ticket: $6.50. Regular popcorn and Diet Coke: $14. Phone chasers, can you please explain to me why $2 worth of popcorn and a Coke costs $14?

Strangely, I think if they had charged me $14 for the movie ticket and $6.50 for the food, I would not feel cheated. Why?

» 7:20 p.m. Pulled into Zaxby's to buy de-iced, iced tea for my wife - half-sweet, half-unsweet, add lemon, no ice - and checked the score of the Steelers game on my phone. What? They lost to the stupid Raiders!?

» 7:21 p.m. Staged my own private, R-rated (for strong language) version of "Mark Breaks the Internet."

» 9:30 p.m. Back home. Sleepy time. Nighty night.

Contact Mark Kennedy at mkennedy@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6645.

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