Example 1 affects your work how? Either way, intelligence agencies were doing that for a while. Multimodal surveillance is also essentially no different than what CIA or a good private eye might do in analog times: surveilling and tracking your movements, finances, your trash, those of your associates, etc. HFT is the same old trading as always, just faster, but the whole idea of yelling in the trading floor is just that: trading at the speed limit of sight and speech. Today it's based on latency of colocalized nodes rather than that of colocalized traders.
Most of what tech does is to just build wrappers to existing analog processes. Part of that is the genuine difficulty of trying to sell something new and different, vs an updated wrapper to an existing process for existing clients with a present day business need.