Humans are creatures of habit and our habit often leaves a detailed insight into who we are, what we are like and what we do with our time. Now I'm sure as it known by now that we certainly leave a digital footprint with everything that we do. Whether we picked up our phone in the morning, whether we liked that picture on Instagram to what Netflix episode we chose from. It seems that everything these days can be tracked, but how is this data helping you really? In what way does the consumer see these benefits if any?

Let us demonstrate using a real world example (a simple silly one). Take phone activity. These days people have become rather more conscious about how often they use their phones and for how long. The iPhone for example tracks "Screen Time", Instagram tracks how many minutes you have spent browsing its pages, these are done so you can manage your time. Using the phones' sensors, and whether you are interacting with the phone, the software then calculates your use and active times. It then feeds back to you either through weekly reports or a specialized app that tracks these metrics. You can then take the relevant measures to cut down as you see fit.

Likewise the benefits of a smart device goes without mentioning. But what of the others that we don't know about (or choose not to). Your connected car perhaps? Your connected fridge? Where you click on a website page and how often? How are those of benefit to us?

As stated before the internet often knows more about us than the closest people in our lives, the above list of items is used by businesses to tailor their offerings to a person or just to improve on their services. The data you feed them, often gets fed back to their product/marketing teams with the intent of learning your habits and deploying changes to cater for them. Too heavy on the brake? No matter we will release an easier brake system that doesn't wear as much. Open and close the fridge 1000 times a day? No matter we will change the cooling cycles to alleviate the strain. Without us even knowing data is making our lives tons better. Getting our hands on data is rather just a search away.

The flip side of data being overtly intrusive and perhaps breaking certain trust boundaries does come up often. A good example of this is demonstrated in the book the Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg, where Target the US hyper store collected data on its clients and their habits and could accurately predict if a woman was pregnant or not. From a technical point of view, it is a fabulous piece of work from the analysts, but not so much from the person who received coupons for baby diapers (when they haven't even told their significant other as of yet, yikes!).

Enter Google Trends

So you want to track and be in the know about the latest trend? You're a business owner of a fancy online store wanting to know what products people are searching for? Well, Google has a very nice platform to look at certain trends and data, called Google Trends