Weird - Businesses being able to know information about people before family members

A couple of years back, there was a story about how a researcher had a challenge; how to identify a person based on their search patterns. After all, what a person searches for reveals to some extent clues to a person, and putting together all the details for a person in terms of their search helped the researcher get details of the person, to the extent that the actual person was identified by the researcher.
There is a lot of hoopla about privacy details, with the amount of details being recorded by search engines, social networks such as Facebook, and online stores that are integrated with these search engines; but the normal citizen is not so worried about such details. Read the details of this story, which worried the giant store Target so much that they tried to stop the details of this story from emerging (link to article):

Every time you go shopping, you share intimate details about your consumption patterns with retailers. And many of those retailers are studying those details to figure out what you like, what you need, and which coupons are most likely to make you happy. Target, for example, has figured out how to data-mine its way into your womb, to figure out whether you have a baby on the way long before you need to start buying diapers.
What Target discovered fairly quickly is that it creeped people out that the company knew about their pregnancies in advance.

One can be sure that it sounds creepy.

Online Privacy (Issues in the Digital Age)	Online Privacy: A Reference Handbook	Privacy Lost: How Technology Is Endangering Your Privacy

Storing everything around you in electronic form

Have you ever thought about how much you see around you, all the experiences you undergo, the people you meet, and so on ? All of these are memories that we junk (after all, how many of us remember the persons who were in the elevator with us a week back) ? If you started remembering all that, you would be a person with a superb memory (many of us have problems with remembering the name of people we went to school with, or even those who were very close friends sometime back). Well, consider the case of a person (as part of an experiment) who saves all information, including the people he meets, the meals he has, the conversation he has, and so on (link to article):

But Bell, who is 75 years old, takes the idea of digital memory to a sci-fi-esque extreme. He carries around video equipment, cameras and audio recorders to capture his conversations, commutes, trips and experiences. Microsoft is working on a SenseCam that would hang around a person's neck and automatically capture every detail of life in photo form. Bell has given that a whirl. He also saves everything -- from restaurant receipts (he take pictures of them) to correspondence, bills and medical records. He makes PDF files out of every Web page he views.

Can you visualize recording your entire life, ready for you to play back whenever you need something. However, if there is something called 'information overload', then such a scene is a perfect example.

Letting people know when you are dead and gone

If you are going to depart from this world, what would think about ? You would worry about the impact this would have on your family in terms of emotional and financial considerations, you would worry about whether you are going to leave with getting all the things done that you would have liked. However, would you worry about informing people on your online communities (including gaming worlds and social networks) that you are not going to be coming back, and they should not expect to see you there again. To some people, this is important as well, and hence an online service is coming up in this regard (link to article):

When Robert Bryant's father died, he left his son a little black USB flash drive in a drawer in his home office. The drive contained a list of contacts for his son to notify, including the administrator of an online group he had been in.
David Eagleman, a neuroscientist at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, has set up a site called Deathswitch, where people can set up emails that will be sent out automatically if they don't check in at intervals they specify.
There's another site: Slightly Morbid. It also sends email when a member dies, but doesn't rely on them logging in periodically while alive. Instead, members have to give trusted friends or family the information needed to log in to the site and start notification process if something should happen.