Gathering data used to be a fringe pursuit of Silicon Valley nerds. Now we’re all at it, recording everything from menstrual cycles and mobility to toothbrushing and time spent in daylight. Is this just narcissism redesigned for the big tech age?

I first heard about my friend Adam’s curious new habit in a busy pub. He said he’d been doing it for over a year, but had never spoken to anyone about it before. He had a furtive look around, then took out his phone and showed me the product of his burning obsession: a spreadsheet.

This was not a record of his annual tax return or numbers he was crunching for work (Adam is a data scientist). Instead, it was a spreadsheet recording the minutiae of his life, with dozens of columns tracking every element of his daily routine. It all started, he told me, because of a recurring argument with his boyfriend. His partner didn’t think they spent enough time together, but Adam thought that they did. There was only one way to settle this, he decided: cold, hard data. So he began keeping a note of the days they saw each other and the days they didn’t.

Apple says removal of tool after government asked for right to see data will make iCloud users more vulnerable

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Apple has taken the unprecedented step of removing its strongest data security tool from customers in the UK, after the government demanded “backdoor” access to user data.

UK users will no longer have access to the advanced data protection (ADP) tool, which uses end-to-end encryption to allow only account holders to view items such as photos or documents they have stored online in the iCloud storage service.

Italian and Irish regulators want answers on how data harvested by chatbot could be used by Chinese government

The Chinese AI platform DeepSeek has become unavailable for download from some app stores in Italy as regulators in Rome and in Ireland demanded answers from the company about its handling of citizens’ data.

Amid growing concern on Wednesday about how data harvested by the new chatbot could be used by the Chinese government, the app disappeared from the Apple and Google app stores in Italy with customers seeing messages that said it was “currently not available in the country or area you are in” for Apple and the download “was not supported” for Google, Reuters reported.