I firmly believe that as more of our lives deal in interactions with digital devices of whatever kind, and this results in excess recorded information, there will be unsuspected consequences. Specifically, once all this random and "unrelated" info is brought together for a person, it can make a great picture of who that person is. Nicholas Feltron's "Annual Report" is the sum of all the data he has collected about himself over the course of a year. Tying into my post about visualizing data from earlier this week, he has aggregated this info and put it down for the world to see in a collection of charts and graphs.
Most people have a tough time comprehending the overall trend of their lives. Its easy to worry about major catastrophes like plane crashes and murders, but the big killers such as over-eating and over-drinking can easily be ignored as they build up over time (check out this Schneier article on the Psychology of Security). If these were tracked for us (despite the privacy concerns... hopefully this would all be collected for our eyes only, not the insurance companies) and we could see how many calories we eat on an average day, or how many alcoholic beverages we drink, would this change our lifestyles? Similarly, we worry about major purchases like houses and cars while spending much more on evenings out and fast-food. It will some day be possible to collect all this information and let the individual "play" with it, in visual formats, to better understand it.
As a side-note, I bet this guy could get pretty annoying with some kind of notebook, marking down how many miles he traveled in a cab or how many photos he's taken on a given day.
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