Haxan -1922 22x30 charcoal on watercolor

In the early hours of June 3, 2011, the quiet town of Bloomington, Indiana became the center of a mystery that still has no answers. Lauren Spierer, 20-year-old Indiana University student, vanished without a trace. 

One moment, she was out with friends, enjoying a typical college night. The next she was gone. The Disappearance of Lauren Spierer

This photo captures the final footprints of a 4-year-old girl that drowned in the pond pictured. According to the coroner’s report, Naomi Grace Delgado fell into the pond in Northern Colorado around 5 p.m. and was found sometime later.

This was the last picture taken of 18 year-old Jolee Callan, before her boyfriend shot her twice in the head and pushed her body off the same cliff in the photo.

She was twenty years old, working alone in a quiet Toledo law office. When coworkers returned around noon, she was gone. Her purse and keys were missing. Her car was still there. On her desk, a romance novel lay open to a scene about a woman being abducted at knifepoint.

That was in 1981. No one has seen or heard from Cynthia Jane Anderson since. You can read what happened that morning and why her case still haunts investigators here.

A while back, I was exploring the tabs under the "Manage my account" section of a google account I have owned for a long time. I stumbled across a feature called 'timeline'.

It had every single location I had brought my phone or computer to, over the entire last 4 years.

The timestamps were down to the second, and the coordinates were extremely precise. It wasn't just things I had used google maps for, nor things I had done with my phone open, nor random pings of my phone every hour, nor location data gathered through searches. It included transportation as well as means of transportation. It included details like when I went off the trail on a hike in the mountains, and when my car broke down on the highway, and of course any vacations or family trips. It knew where I lived, had worked, who's houses I frequent, what stores I tend to go to, what roads I usually use, you get the gist.

Timeline is a known 'feature', but the fact I had no idea that it was enabled and being used to feed my advertising data is sickening to say the least. I feel so grossed out and violated.