"But unless the intention is to make decisions with this data, one might wonder what the purpose of such a system could possibly be."

Speaking as an analyst, you'd be amazed (or not) at how much analytics is done either for resume padding, because one guy thinks it's "cool", or to enable marketing or executives to chase their own tails.

Indeed, with the general phenomenon of bullshit jobs, infinite instantaneous and always changing information is a welcome smokescreen, because it always allows people to "justify doing something". With such numbers, there is always something for them to do :p