In October, 2014, Facebook information architect and native New Yorker, Nicholas Felton, will publish a 16 page 2013 Annual Report – into himself. In this report, fulsomely illustrated with a plethora of stunning data visualisations, Felton has collected and analysed every aspect of his life. Here is an example of all the things, places, phones, music, weather he encountered in Q2, 2014. His life reads like an audit.

Felton is a pioneer of an increasingly common part of our everyday: the quantified life. While Felton has developed apps and algorithms to count and measure his own history, this is something that is happening to us all whether we like it or not. For as we go about our busy urban lives, we are being measured, counted and watched by governments, businesses and technology – and if you so want, yourself.

In the city of the information age, every aspect of the metropolis can be transformed into data, reduced to numbers, and passed into a large data set that can then analyse and predict future events on a scale previously unimagined. Just as Felton’s 2014 usage of email SmS and Facebook can help us predict how he might communicate in the future, we can also measure and monitor every step and stage of his daily affairs. But does all this data amount to a human life? Isn’t there something missing from this smooth algorithmic approach to the real, unpredictable world? There is an irony that Felton constructs his report with all the sheen of an IPO brochure in search of investors.

We are becoming our own data sets. Everywhere we go, we are developing data streams that will allow other to predict what we will do next. But we are also participating in the harvest. It is now estimated that 60% of all 16-34 years old have used a self-quantifying device: sleep monitors, pedometers, quant. Apps, Geo-locators such as 4Square, and so on. What we are hoping to achieve is individual happiness, but there is a snag: anything that can be measured – especially something like happiness – can then be given a price.

Wearable tech, such as smart watches, fills the spaces of the city with information. Using augmented reality devices from phones to spectacles one looks through data outwards into the real world. There are also numerous innovations in health tech, such contact lenses that can help diabetics to monitor their sugar levels.

The pursuit of happiness becomes a commodification of the willing participant. For example, Fitbit currently sell for £79, and offers a series of products that count steps - little more than a digital pedometer. However, the gadget also can be used to download your fitness data to a website where you can monitor your own fitness regime or compare it with others. However, the company is also sharing the same data with other parties, a series of medical and insurance companies, without your permission. They are making a substantial secondary income from this sale that they are not sharing with you. This lucrative trade in your meta data – your name and address is deleted, but your sex, age and zip code remains viewable – comes under the terms of ‘informed consent’ that is hidden in the terms and conditions of signing up to the site. (In a recent study, it was calculated that 80% of all Americans could be identified by their meta data with a small amount of research.)

More seriously, self quantification may soon be enforced upon us. Car insurers may expect us to have monitors on our engines so they can monitor for usage. It is perhaps indicative that in a recent article in the Economist, one insurance executive noted that he avoided having a loyalty card for any grocery store and always bought his fast food with cash, just so that it could not be tracked by any insurers via his credit card.

Perhaps even more disturbing is the quantified Baby movement, which sees the mass harvesting of data around a new born and early years child. This includes surveillance, wearable technology, as well as the development of childcare apps that track in order to monitor feeding, sleeping, nappy changing. This underpins the disturbing assumption that the accumulation of data can in itself preserve life. It also opens up the constant data-ization of life from the cradle to the grave.