One afternoon this past January, I got a telephone call from Tom Menino.

He was concerned about me, since it was about to be as cold as it gets in this neck of the woods. He assured me that I could find help if I needed it. He gave me phone numbers to call.

The message was recorded, of course, but it was intended to be kind. Mayor Menino was addressing the senior citizens of Boston. Now I hadn’t really thought of myself as a senior citizen before his call, even though I know how old I am, and I hadn’t yet thought of myself as someone who needed help.

But how did Mayor Menino know how old I am? And where did he get my phone number?

Comcast unnerved me even more. When I had trouble with my television I called the Comcast number and eventually spoke to a very nice lady who was extremely helpful. But amid all the help, I soon realized she knew exactly what I had been watching for the last several days. Now I’m not really concerned that she knew that during the election I was obsessed with CNN, Rachel Maddow, and the Daily Show. It isn’t as if I had been watching porn. But still.

These instances reminded me that there’s another group of people tracking my movements. It’s our security system guys. For awhile the beam in our stairway caught us if we got up in the night to go to the bathroom. That’s fixed, but it goes off if we forget to turn off the alarm before we go down for breakfast. We forget maybe once every few months. So the alarm company people could learn, if they cared to, how often we get up in the middle of the night. And they know approximately the time we arise in the morning. What could they do with that information? Probably pretty little.

We know from the Mumbai investigation and other reports that our cell phone calls can be traced and logged. Snoopers who knew what they were doing could get into my computer and find out with whom I had been corresponding and what we were saying. In fact, the Boston Police took away my laptop for part of a day to try to recover a couple of emails I had erased that came from the man who called himself Clark Rockefeller, whom I had met briefly.

Actually, about every minute of our lives can be traced. Our credit card records show where we’ve been and what we’ve bought. Google maintains—at least for awhile—a list showing the web sites we’ve searched for. The Fast Lane pass shows where we drive and, presumably, how fast. Once upon a time if you were a spy, you could take a walk and meet someone along the way and pass on strategic information—or at least that’s what I’ve read in spy novels. But no longer. One of the cameras installed at numerous Boston intersections might catch you. (I tried to find out how many intersections were so equipped, but I guess the Mayor’s office was too busy making phone calls to potentially cold senior citizens to call me back with that information.)

Most of this is good, I think. Mayor Menino’s message might keep someone from freezing to death and the means of tracking us are conveniences or entertainment we would be loathe to give up.

And 100 years from now, biographers and historians will be able to mine all kinds of information that will help them determine what happened in the year 2009 that isn’t available now to researchers investigating 1909.

But there is one place where there will be no information to discover. It’s at the Boston Athenaeum. When I couldn’t remember the name of a book, I asked a librarian if she could bring up on her screen the books I had checked out in the last year. She was sorry, she said, but the Athenaeum purposely doesn’t keep such records, since the choices their readers make are private. That means Dick Cheney won’t be able to learn about the subversive literature I favor.

Then I remembered that Dick Cheney is gone, even though he does pop up from time to time trying to frighten us.

But for people like me, it is Cheney and his cohorts who would probably get me if they could, given how much information is available. Since January 20, 2009 has come and gone, I’m hoping I’m safe for now.