How to Immerse Yourself in "Good" Internet Tracking

All the recent news about Internet surveillance and tracking technology freaks a lot of people out, and I get that. But it could also be kind of cool. Take Immersion, for example. Immersion is a new network data visualization that displays your email history in attractive webs. And the accuracy is scary.

Created by Deepak Jagdish, Daniel Smilkov, and Cesar Hidalgo at MIT Media Lab’s Macro Connections, Immersion scans through your email history, specifically focusing on header sections: From, To, CC, and the timestamp. The interactive program takes the information from those fields and creates a web of your personal relationships.

When you open the program, it asks to access your email. After a few seconds of wait time, a colorful web of your interactions comes up, as well as your stats, which include number of collaborators, number of emails in total, number of emails sent, and number of emails received. You can also adjust the web to display data for either the past week, past month, past week, or your entire email history.

I took it for a test drive, and the program proved to be pretty accurate. I’ve had my Gmail account since July 18, 2012 with almost 10,000 sent, according to Immersion’s data.

The web even links people related by company, school, and other measures.

Another neat Internet tracking service is Lumi, which installs a browser plug-in to track your recent search history. Using the information gathered from your history, Lumi shows suggestions for related searches and compiles a list of articles from a variety of places that you might be interested in. A beta version of Lumi, created by Last.fm co-founders Felix Miller and Martin Stiksel, was unveiled last December, but the full public version was just launched.

Miller and Stiksel told Mashable that they've been developing the service for two years with the help and money of friends and family. Lumi makes recommendations based on posts you click on, posts you scroll past, and worldwide trending pages.

Although the results aren’t as accurate as they could be (I swear I haven’t googled Megan Fox in at least a few weeks--or Jaden Smith, for that matter), most of the recommended articles are ones I would be interested in.

Immersion and Lumi are just two services of hundreds that use your internet history in a helpful way. I guess Internet tracking isn’t always bad if you have it done by choice.