IIRC, there are data fusion services (not advertised, on purpose) that merge data from stores and other sources, and sell the fused data.

Phone location being part of this, yes in a way.

I know this is vague, but if you look at Walmart's patents [0], surveillance capitalism is in its infancy. Phones are a big part of this. Apps ask for, and get, tons of information you might not be aware of.

There are several posts on HN referencing this and profuse denials from Walmart, if you believe them.

[0] https://groundworkcollaborative.org/work/the-walmart-watchto...

In what way? It seems like you’re saying something without saying it.

Also, does your question mean all smartphones or just Apple?

In general, and in respect to the platform as a whole instead of individual apps, the far more invasive platform is Android.

Google is far more invasive because they need to be, they’re otherwise not getting much out of every customer. They have no choice but to monetize everything that the user is doing with the OS.

Apple owns the entire stack, hardware and software. And so, the vast majority of its revenue and profit margins comes from the sale of the hardware; the few services it provides for free are basically a rounding error in terms of costs. So it can be highly privacy-based, with essentially no deep knowledge of what the user is doing unless the user permits that telemetry.

Individual apps, however - YMMV. Apple has shown itself to be more restrictive on what apps can do on their platform, and will much more eagerly b*tchslap a shady operator. But problem apps exist on both platforms.

Apple (or somebody) would have to accumulate all the footage first and get it into a searchable database.

That's actually too predatory for a free country right there, without going any further. Which is Flock's problem, independent cameras have been around for decades, and often in public, without the general public resisting their ubiquity.

Everything else rolls downhill from there. Who knows what different parties would do with the data? That's a whole 'nother can of worms.

So the cameras themselves are not the most un-American component, it's the network and the way it's handled that makes so many people feel like preserving what remaining privacy there is means more to them than tracking every single person's movements all the time everywhere.

All kinds of people have instinctively recognized that a total surveillance system is like a lot of other things, the system itself needs to be more predatory by nature than the "less-organized" scofflaws and actual criminal predators who are the targets, in order gain overwhelming odds on capturing them all. Like the old saying goes it takes a thief to catch a thief.

IOW when you treat everybody as guilty until proven innocent, you get a lot more criminals that way.

But that's just not the American way, so patriotic Americans balk.