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When Amanda Hess found out she was pregnant with her first kid, she was home alone.

She'd just taken a pregnancy test.

I immediately Googled what to do when you get pregnant.

That was a pretty good clue to the internet that I was pregnant now.

Amanda is a critic at large at the New York Times and the author of Second Life,

having a child in the digital age. I think one of the things that's so insidious about

pregnancy-related tech is that a lot of people are not discussing their pregnancies much, especially at the

very beginning of them. I told the internet about my pregnancy before I told anyone else, even my

husband. I wanted to wait for him to come home to tell him. As a writer covering the intersection of the

internet and pop culture, Amanda was probably more familiar than most with all the subtle,

surprising ways technology can embed itself in our lives, through our fitness trackers or those

games we play on our phones while we're on the subway. But when she got pregnant, her relationship

to the internet got complicated in a way she really didn't want or expect.

The way that I used the internet was to put in any feeling or information that I maybe felt

a little ashamed of speaking to anyone else about.

So it just becomes this repository for like all of my fears and

like my weird body stuff and stuff like that. I just fed that to these apps and systems that

exist to try to make money off of me. It happens so fast. Amanda was served ads for products like prenatal vitamins within 48 hours of her first

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