A similar thing can be said about taking photographs (which is legal) versus recording people's behavior in a database (akin to drag-net surveillance, which we do not trust the government with, let alone companies or individuals).

Actually, I think it's legal for individuals or companies but not for the government. For example, the government can't install surveillance cameras in a shopping mall, but the mall owner can. The government can't watch people shop in stores, but stores are installing cameras to track how people move through the store, what items they smile at, and what they finally buy.

I was listening to a podcast recently where they were talking about a future where companies will drive around, pick up peoples trash, then process it to build a profile of the household. Because trash is fair game once you drop it off at the curb, they claimed there was nothing stopping anybody from doing this.

It was a very brief segment and I couldn't find it, but the idea stood out to me. I could totally see somebody thinking about this - thinking about how much it costs to dispose of a bag of garbage plus the cost to process it compared to the value of the data inside. I could see a company like Amazon figuring out which neighborhoods have their best customers and wanting that data to figure out how to sell them even more stuff.

It's simultaneously fascinating and abhorrent to me.

In various other parts of the world, if this system works as described in the news articles then it's probably going to get eaten alive, possibly along with anyone deploying it.