Self report

You say what you think, how you want things to be, but you are what you do. Visa, Google, OpenAI all know you better than you know yourself. They are not hindered by defense mechanisms; their currency is data. And though data can be used to lie, in its raw form, it never does. It just is what it is. You can trust with 100% certainty that self-reporting will contain inaccuracies. It might get close if the reporter doesn’t know about, doesn’t care about, or is not actively involved in any agenda affected by this data. Otherwise, you can’t trust it. I trust your credit card, monthly statement. I trust your search history implicitly. Not the one you didn’t have a chance to curate. The ones Google, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, et al. took without asking. (Technically, they asked, or you couldn’t have joined. But who reads that fine print?)