So the title of the latest StackOverflow podcast (I'm not a listener; caught in the sidebar) is "One in four visitors to Stack Overflow copies code".

Wait. Wait... you're watching me that closely?

Our April Fools prank taught us there is more than a kernel of truth to the old joke about borrowing software smarts from Stack Overflow. Kyle Pollard explains how we built the software behind the joke, and Cassidy Williams explains how we built the actual keyboard.

Oh, it was just part of that joke where a pop-over would appear any time you hit Ctrl- or Command-C. I guess that's an interesting fringe benefit of it. (I'll try not to quibble that you don't know it was code being copied, but maybe they're sniffing that too.)

Except... there's no way I'm going to think it was just alive during the April Fools' Day prank.

And even if it was constrained to then, let this be a clear lesson of how closely websites are listening to you. I mean, we all already knew this, but it's an example of how seeing something in person is convincing in a way amorphous, theoretical knowledge isn't.

Not only can this sort of metric be taken, it is taken easily, and, if you saw that April Fools' popover, it was taken from you.

Did StackOverflow listen this closely when it was in version 1? No chance. No, really. No chance.

Does it and other mature sites listen to you this closely now? Of course they do. As do your apps. As does your OS. As does...

I may have mentioned this before, but I had a time a few years back when I was wearing a mechanical watch, had forgotten my phone (and, therefore, my wallet case), and was walking to the grocery store for lunch with a $20 bill in my pocket, thinking during the walk that, for the first time in likely years, I was performing something completely [well, okay, relatively] off the grid, nothing digital, nothing battery-powered, not even a grocery reward card, on my person.

Similiarly, it's rare that I read a paper book -- a true codex -- without thinking that I'm glad Amazon or Apple or whoever is behind Libby isn't tracking how quickly I read each page. Not that I mind being tracked for the most part, and I appreciate Libby telling me about how much time I likely have left in a book before my library loan is up, but it's nice sometimes to be walking to the store with nobody virtually watching.

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