For the past couple of years, I’ve been using a bullet journal to track all kinds of things. Work assignments and appointments, my son’s soccer games and karate classes, my workouts, even what I made for dinner. (The dinner tracking is particularly helpful whenever I find myself in a rut—spaghetti again?—because I can flip back a couple of months and rediscover a recipe that we liked and then promptly forgot about.)

Internet ads are so invasive that we can’t blame you for thinking that Facebook is listening to you talk. It’s probably not, but it is helping ad networks track you across the internet and across your apps. In 2018, tech public policy expert Chris Yiu tweeted 14 different ways that ads follow you around the internet, even when you’re logged out, in incognito, using a different browser, or on a new device.

It’s time to update to a brand-new version of Firefox Quantum. While your browser will eventually do this for you, I recommend forcing the issue by clicking the hamburger icon, clicking on “Help,” and then clicking on “About Firefox.” And while Firefox 70 downloads to your desktop or laptop, here’s a quick look at what’s new.

Your web browser knows a lot about you, and tells the sites you visit a lot about you as well — if you let it. We’ve talked about which browsers are best at ad-blocking, but in this guide, we’re going to focus on the browsers that you’ll want to use to better conceal everything you’re up to from all the advertisers that want to track your digital life.

Email tracking can be a shitty practice. I can’t think of a better way to describe the latest reports that Silicon Valley fad Superhuman — a $US30/mo email service — kept tabs on how many times email recipients opened a message.

There are a lot of apps out there to track things such as your period or your mental health ups and downs. But the simplest way to keep track of what’s going on with your body is just to create a calendar (in Google Calendar or wherever you keep your appointments) called “health”.

Tracking what you eat is a lot like budgeting: You have a certain amount of calories or nutrients to “spend” throughout the day. Planning is key, which can be a little nerve-wracking: What if I spent too many calories on breakfast? Will I be hungry at dinner?

iOS/Android/Web: Task management apps are all well and good, but sometimes you need a little more organisational firepower than a simple (digital) to-do list. I’ve been playing around with Nozbe lately, and I’ve enjoyed how the app makes it easy to track everything you need to do in the many projects you’re juggling at any one time.

Does the entire world really need to see where you’re tweeting from? I usually don’t think about how much location data I’m sharing on Twitter, because I don’t think anybody cares about my 1) tweets and 2) where I tweet. However, a new report from Wired has made me rethink my approach. As it turns out, it’s not that difficult to pinpoint exactly where you live via your tweets.

Guess what? A bunch of apps like knowing where you are, so that their developers can then take that data, package it up for various advertising companies, and make a quick buck off of your precise whereabouts—including where you go and how long you spend there.

Android, iOS: You may be right to view apps or services that promise to "track your entire life" with suspicion. What does a company do with that data? Do you really need something to catalogue every place you go, every photo you take, and every mood you feel?

Hurricane Florence is expected to make landfall along the US Atlantic coast tonight or tomorrow. While coastal Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina are expected to be the hardest hit, anyone who lives along the US Eastern seaboard should be keeping a close eye on the storm’s progress.

iOS: Throughout the day, I always know I should be doing things to better my health and overall disposition: Standing at regular intervals, drinking a lot of water, telling my friends they are great and we should hang out, and so on. And while these thoughts hit me on occasion, they're never enough to create a regular lifestyle pattern. Thankfully, the free iOS app Aloe Bud is happy to help out.

Ever wonder how much money you've blown on Steam games over the years? You might not want to really know, but you're probably curious. And now thanks to Valve's "External Funds Used" tracker, you can finally get a sense of the long-term damage Steam has done to your financial health.

Mac: If you've ever been curious about just how much time you spend in an app, Usage is a simple little utility that will track just that.

Web: There are a million ways to track your habits, but Daybook takes a very simple approach. You add the habits you want to build, then click a counter each time you do the activity and that's it. No dates, no stats, nothing fancy.

Chrome/Firefox/Opera: When Privacy Badger launched a few years ago, it was already a great tool to block third-party trackers, speed up the web and stop sites from watching your every move while you browse. The latest version is a huge improvement, in almost every way.

Google tracks a lot of your data. If you're comfortable with that, it can make your life a little easier. If you're not, it can be a pain to figure out how to turn it off. Fortunately, there's one settings page where you can disable a lot of it.

iOS/Android (Samsung devices): Disconnect has long been one of our favourite tools for protecting your privacy online, and today Disconnect is rolling out a new mobile app called Privacy Pro that blocks trackers across your device.