Google Map and street view got the extremely low hanging fruit of privacy related information. The rubber of information meets the road where conceptual knowledge meets physical reality. Where information connects to something real. Real things like geographical location and real people. Real things that exist in real time and space as opposed to the conceptual abstract of these things.
Rather than call the nexus of Conceptual/Real the low hanging fruit of information for easy picking, it might be more like bottom feeding in the information food chain that builds up in a bottom up assembly process to a top level control. Conversely, top level control is a managerial start point to drill down in a top down breakdown process to what is necessary to efficiently feed on the information plankton at the bottom that supports the whale.
Positioning a person in time and space over a time line is about the most basic information that can be gathered on a person. That defines the unique identity of a person. Who exactly that unique person is distinct from all other people on earth. That unique identification is what information engineering seeks as the fundamental building block of any conceptual information system. Total information all the time is knowing where a unique person is/was at any given time in the past/present and will likely be in the future. Call that an information lock on a person. What they have done, what they are doing right now and what they will most likely do in the future all related to real/conceptual things.
Call it the God's eye view.
When that is known there is much money to be made with the real/conceptual information system. To the extent that "companies are people my friend", what applies to individuals also applies to their social structure entities.
As I type this I can see the google save button saving with surprising frequency. It is abnormal. Why is that. It means what I type is going into the cloud quickly. Maybe not so quickly now? It probably save in real time anyhow.
LPR is the next tier of low hanging geographic/conceptual information. So easy to get. Just drive around with a camera like google did. Note that license plates are block out in google street view. Pay people to drive around and vacuum up license plate info. Something anyone and everyone can participate in to monetize their video camera. Millions of cars are on the road going from point A to point B at any given time. With a device that reads all other license plates they could sell the information collected for a penny per hundred or thousand read. Might be a good way to defray the expense of driving. If every truck on the interstate had an LPR reader then license plates of vehicles on the interstate could be tracked in near real time. Instead of monetizing the data base truckers could monetize the presence of their truck on a the road with little or no added expense.
The next tier of low hanging fruit? Facial recognition. Faces as license plates that identify a unique person with greater accuracy than a license plate.
Beyond that and reaching a little higher? MAC addresses of personal computing devices.
In every case there must be defense of the right to collect this information and turn it into money. Entities that make money on information collection are of course the prime defenders to their right to do it. It is big bucks business and big bucks will be spent to protect it. Big bucks going into the media/political domains to establish/thwart laws and sway public opinion.
There is obviously a ton of money to be made picking the low hanging information fruit that has a cost of production that is next to nothing and a great value when connected to existing information for data mining.
There is also a ton of money to be made in the business of making such information collection acceptable to the public that this information gathering feeds on. Fear probably being the primary motivator as well as the frequent flip side of fear which is hate of those that are feared and justification of anything to control them.
Hell of a way to make money but there is a hell of a lot of money to be made. Fruit pickers to gather the information are cheap labor.
How much did google drivers get paid. What is the current value of the information they produced?
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