I remember a few years back when Google let you view a map of your daily movements over the past few years or something. I saw this map and turned off location tracking. Most people I talked to thought this was neat and forgot about it shortly after, because no one is using this information to hurt people in visible ways.

Because the average person doesn't understand the pervasive nature of the surveillance capitalism model.

In fact, as Shoshanna Zuboff[0] discusses in her book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism[1], those engaged in such activities take great pains to make sure that you don't notice it.

We're only talking about this here, now because it's highly visible and the state has taken an interest in using such surveillance data for its purposes.

You might think it's a good thing that people are starting to notice, and on some levels it is. However, this sort of activity has been going on for so long and is so embedded in the culture that people just don't pay attention any more.

But this sort of thing has a long history of happening, mostly unimpeded in the US at least. Credit reporting agencies/scoring and the data brokers that go with them have been around for decades.

Advertising Research[2][3] goes back a century, with automated data analysis reaching back to the late 1960s. Statistical techniques developed then were refined in the early to mid 1970s at Grey Advertising among other agencies and moved into the advertising mainstream by the 1980s with projects like Backer Spielvogel Bates' GlobalScan[4].

However the costs of collecting primary data across the globe was prohibitive for all but the largest advertising agencies/consumer products companies.

This limited both the scope and effectiveness of such research.

Since the advent of "Social Media" the sorts of data collected by projects like GlobalScan at the cost of millions/annum are now freely provided by vastly more people.

That drives the thirst for more data, more detail, more ability to identify target markets. And that's great. For marketers. Less so for those who are constantly bombarded by increasingly individualized ads for products, services and political messages.

This wholesale collection of data about people has been so successful that it has become an important part of many organizations -- even if data collection/analysis/brokerage isn't their core business.

What we see now with Amazon Echo/Ring, Google Nest, etc. is just the logical (if incredibly evil) evolution of this market trend.

That law enforcement wants to tap into this enormous stream of data isn't remarkable. They've been data mining pen registers[9] and phone location data (using the Third-Party Doctrine[10] as justification) via telecom records. And Stingray[5] tracking has been a thing for quite some time.

They also dig through social media too.

And the hubris/liberty endangering partnership of Amazon (with Ring devices) and law enforcement[6] is quite frightening.

And this isn't the first time that police have attempted to access conversations from "smart" speakers to use in criminal prosecutions[7][8].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoshana_Zuboff

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Surveillance_Capita...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_research

[3] https://thearf.org/about-arf/

[4] https://www.coursehero.com/file/p7tsoeb/Backer-Spielvogel-Ba...

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stingray_phone_tracker

[6] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/08/28/doorbel...

[7] https://www.thedailybeast.com/police-seek-amazon-echo-data-i...

[8] https://www.engadget.com/2019-11-02-florida-police-obtain-al...

[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pen_register

[10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine

Edit: Added detail about Pen Registers and the Third-Party Doctrine.