Companies’ ‘Wrapped’ Features Keep Getting Weirder

Companies’ ‘Wrapped’ Features Keep Getting Weirder Metro stops, LinkedIn DMs, and other mundane data points are being packaged for the end-of-year trend. Illustration by Ben Kothe / The Atlantic Olivier Touron / AFP / Getty This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. The holidays are a time for reflection, but lately I’ve been overthinking things: Over the past few weeks, I’ve listened to a playlist of my top songs via Spotify “Wrapped,” revisited my summer-long job hunt on LinkedIn’s Year in Review, and ruminated on my crossword abilities with The New York Times ’ Year in Games feature. In 2025, there seem to be more of these data interpolators than ever: The event-planning service Partiful invites users to an After Party, revealing the people they socialized with the most this year. Your Year With ChatGPT lets us see how many em dashes we exchanged with AI. There’s also PlayStation’s Wrap-Up, Goodreads’ Year in Books, and Years in Review for Duolingo, Letterboxd, and Oura. Even Untappd, a social network for beer enthusiasts, has a year-end wrap-up called Recappd. The wrap-up tradition has been around for a number of years, but what was once a cheeky bit of marketing has now expanded into a full-blown season of its own. In today’s internet landscape, personalization is the coin of the realm: Search results, on-site advertisements, and social feeds are all tailored to users’ precise desires based on their behaviors. During recap season, those behaviors themselves become the product. Data typically reserved for in-house analytics teams are suddenly interesting in and of themselves-and reviewing those data can be fun, until we’re reminded just how much we’re tracked, and just how valuable our data are to companies’ bottom line. Because the market for year-end-data visualization has become so bloated, and because consumers now practically expect their digital habits to be condensed and repackaged, products and services that really needn’t be “wrapped” are being contorted into the format. For the past few years, the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority has issued a Metro Rewind, totaling commuters’ top bus and railway stops. The goal, according to a press release , is nothing less than “transforming each person’s transit history into a vivid, shareable snapshot that captures how you move across the region.” No data set is too mundane for this treatment: The cloud-storage service Google One sent out a Year in Review telling users how much of their allotted storage they’ve used up, and reminding them how long they’ve been subscribed. But the year-end recaps that seem to work best are the ones that give people something they actually want. In the case of Spotify Wrapped, the promotional blitz is productive both for the company collecting the data and for the user. Wrapped is a glorified ad for Spotify’s ability to make money off its users’ data, but...

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