Everyone loves a good year-end wrap up like Spotify Wrapped. If companies are going to collect our data, the least they can do is regift some of it back to us with aesthetic infographics.

I, however, take it one step further and track everything I do all year long. Whether it’s the music I listen to, the books I’m reading, or the restaurants I’m at, I have an app for it. I think it’s fun to rank and rate things, so I love anything that gives me an opportunity to do that.

But every so often, I’ll be ranking a restaurant or rating a book and have the jarring realization that I am really just willingly giving random companies tons of data about myself. And naturally, I’ve never read the terms & conditions for any of the apps I use. They could be doing anything with my data and I would never know.

I am ranking all the ranking platforms I use based on how much I would be affected if the companies started using my data for Evil Purposes, from least affected to most affected.

Untappd lets me rank beers I’ve tried and list where I had them. If Untappd turned evil, my life would barely be affected, if at all. I don’t like beer that much, so I mostly use the app to see what my friends are drinking. If you looked at my profile, the only thing you’d see are the occasional Millers and Coronas. 

Storygraph is the app I use to list & rate all the books I read. I log the day I start a book, its format (hardcover, paperback, digital, etc), the day I finish the book, and my rating out of 5 stars. I’ve read 38 books so far this year, so it has all of that data 38 times over. 

Storygraph takes the information about me and gives me charts about the pace, genre, and length of books I read; my average time to finish a book, my most read authors, and how many books and pages I read each month.

Even though it knows a lot about my reading habits, I would only be mildly affected if Storygraph turned evil. Mostly because there’s some features I don’t take advantage of: you can log your progress in terms of % completed or pages read as you read the book, but I’m too lazy for that. So while the app knows a lot about my reading habits, it doesn’t know everything. Also, I’m just not sure how much 38 data points could really hurt me.

I know Wrapped isn’t a full app itself, but it’s the blueprint for user data dumps. I’ve been using Spotify for six years now (since I was 16) so it has seen me go through a lot of phases with my listening habits. 

I probably listen to at least two hours of music a day, so Spotify can use my data to draw pretty accurate conclusions about me. It’s fun to know I was a top 0.01% listener of Don Toliver, but crazy to think of how specific their taste profiles for each user can get. They wouldn’t be able to tell me my listening habits are most like that of San Luis Obispo with only basic information.

‍I would be moderately affected if Spotify turned evil. Partly because of all the data I know they have on me, and partly because music can also tell you a lot about a person. My listening habits change depending on what’s going on in my life, and they might be able to pick up on that based on when I’m listening to Tate McRae vs Ethel Cain.

Airbuds is like a constant Spotify Wrapped: I get mini recaps on a weekly basis. But it also shows a live feed of what my friends and I are actively listening to and have recently listened to.

Of course, Airbuds is a third-party app, so I have to link my Spotify to the app for it to work. Sort of a data breach waiting to happen for those who don’t read the terms and conditions (me).

While similar to Spotify Wrapped, I think the live feed & having to share data across apps puts me in a position to be pretty affected if Airbuds turned evil.

Beli is the app where I rank every restaurant I go to. But it knows a lot more than that: I can tell it when I ate there, what my favorite dishes were, who I ate with, upload photos, and save places I want to try in the future.

This is my all time favorite ranking app, and I religiously log every restaurant I go to. I have even ranked the Ikea restaurant (it got a 4.1). To date, I’ve ranked 131 spots and have 35 more bookmarked. 

Beli knows absolutely everything about my eating habits. The date is always accurate, I tag my friends when I can, and I upload photos with most reviews. 

Beli also knows my travel schedule: I have a set “home” city, so it knows when and where I’m travelling based on what restaurants I’m logging. 

Beli turning evil could destroy my life. It knows way too much about me and my eating habits.

I know my life would go on as normal if I didn’t rank restaurants or see how much music I listened to in a given week. But I think it’s fun to look back on where I’ve been, how I’ve grown, and essentially have lists of favorites everywhere. So, good news for corporations, I will risk it and keep giving you more data than you need.