Earlier this year, an editor working on The Times’s Privacy Project asked me whether I’d be interested in having all my digital activity tracked, examined in meticulous detail and then published — you know, for journalism. “Hahaha,” I said, and then I think I made an “at least buy me dinner first” joke, but it turned out he was serious. What could I say? I’m new here, I like to help, and, conveniently, I have nothing whatsoever at all to hide.

Like a colonoscopy, the project involved some special prep. I had to install a version of the Firefox web browser that was created by privacy researchers to monitor how websites track users’ data. For several days this spring, I lived my life through this Invasive Firefox, which logged every site I visited, all the advertising tracking servers that were watching my surfing and all the data they obtained. Then I uploaded the data to my colleagues at The Times, who reconstructed my web sessions into the gloriously invasive picture of my digital life you see here. (The project brought us all very close; among other things, they could see my physical location and my passwords, which I’ve since changed.)

What did we find? The big story is as you’d expect: that everything you do online is logged in obscene detail, that you have no privacy. And yet, even expecting this, I was bowled over by the scale and detail of the tracking; even for short stints on the web, when I logged into Invasive Firefox just to check facts and catch up on the news, the amount of information collected about my endeavors was staggering.

The session documented here took place on a weekday in June. At the time, I was writing a column about Elizabeth Warren’s policy-heavy political strategy, which involved a lot of Google searches, a lot of YouTube videos, and lots of visits to news sites and sites of the candidates themselves. As soon as I logged on that day, I was swarmed — ad trackers surrounded me, and, identifying me by a 19-digit number I think of as a prisoner tag, they followed me from page to page as I traipsed across the web.

Looking at this picture of just a few hours online, what stands out to me now is how ordinary a scene it depicts: I didn’t have to visit any shady sites or make any untoward searches — I just had to venture somewhere, anywhere, and I was watched. This is happening every day, all the time, and the only reason we’re O.K. with it is that it’s happening behind the scenes, in the comfortable shadows. If we all had pictures like this, we might revolt.

Where I live

This tracker for Advertising.com received my almost exact location as latitude and longitude — about a quarter mile off from my actual location. Several other trackers gathered information about where I was, including my city, state, country and zip code. They base this off my IP address, so I had no chance to opt-out. They use the data to conduct targeted advertising but can also use it to track where I’m moving and build a more detailed picture of my interests and activities.

Widgets or trackers?

Tracking scripts like this one for Twitter allow websites to add useful features like share buttons. But the scripts often double as trackers meant to record site visits and build profiles about users. In this case, Twitter can use the information about this page to suggest new followers or sell more targeted advertising on its platform.

My unique identifier: 5535203407606041218

The internet wasn’t built to track people across websites. But that didn’t stop advertisers. They developed technology to share identifiers among websites. This line connects all trackers that were sharing one of my unique IDs, created by the advertising company AppNexus as I browsed the internet and then stored on my browser for others to use. I had about a dozen IDs shared among sites I visited, but this one was present on eight different pages, shared with nearly a dozen trackers and advertisers including Amazon, Yahoo, Google and lesser-known companies like SpotX and Quantcast.

Fingerprinting

Even when companies don’t have an ID to track me, they can use signals from my computer to guess who I am across sites. That’s partly why trackers like this one received more information about my computer than you could imagine being useful, like my precise screen size. Other trackers received my screen resolution, browser information, operating system details, and more.

Election tracking

Websites for Democratic presidential candidates Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg were also participating in aggressive online tracking. Their sites sent data to Facebook, Twitter, Google, Amazon and about a dozen other third-party trackers. Warren’s site also sent my latitude and longitude to Heap Analytics along with a field indicating whether I was living in an early-primary state (I wasn’t).

News sites were the worst

Among all the sites I visited, news sites, including The New York Times and The Washington Post, had the most tracking resources. This is partly because the sites serve more ads, which load more resources and additional trackers. But news sites often engage in more tracking than other industries, according to a study from Princeton.

Google, Google, everywhere

Google’s own domains don’t contain that many trackers. The same is true for Facebook. But that’s because they place most of their trackers on other websites. Google was present on every site I visited, collecting information on where I live, the device I used and everything I looked at.