It's really cool to think that all of this data exists, but I'm not really sure that it's useful. Occasionally I've gone back through my old search history for that one old post that I wanted to re-read, or go through my Spotify listening history to find a song I really enjoyed but forgot the name of, but 99% of that data goes to waste.
Quantified Self [0] is an interesting project to me since it seems to make use of data from all of these disparate sources, but I'm still not sure what the outcome of tracking all of this data is. It seems cool but not useful.
It's also like all the wires I have in boxes and draws at my house. As soon as I throw them out I need them!
Not with gmail you can't.
As of a couple of years ago, gmail search was a crap-shoot. It would consistently fail on some things, occasionally fail on others, and work just fine on cases that looked (to me) to be the same.
Yes, this was on a paid account.
Most of my personal "note taking" is either time tracking entries for Customer billing or emails sent to myself with keywords in the subject line and the notes in the body.
I wish I could get at my phone's (iPhone) browser history, call database, and location services database easily to amalgamate into my "digital life panopticon" too.
I love being able to search over even this limited corpus of data. I can "remember" where I was and what I was doing on a given day pretty easily. I discovered that I can often get "organic" recollection when I prime my brain with a few context details gleaned from the digital corpus. ("I was at xxx site that day, I had lunch at yyy restaurant, and when I got back I looked at these websites... Ah, and now I remember what Bob and I talked about that afternoon!")
I'd love to have audio and low frame-rate video recording on my person during all my waking hours. If I had that, though, I'd keep it completely secret (and use parallel reconstruction if I need to divulge "memories" gleaned from it to others).