Nowadays with a raspberry pi and a 128gb SD card you can go to town on "all location data for the last year for all American cell phones".
Back in 1994, even coordinating reliable central writes of all that location data would have been extraordinarily complicated, and there was not yet a panopticon appetite that would attempt the endeavor without a heavily funded psychopath behind it.
As "we the industry" have gotten more capable (and comfortable) processing huge quantities of data (eg: post map-reduce), and the hardware requirements have fallen to "my cell phone could compute it in an hour", the risk has increased tremendously.
Same story with muskets, cannons and tanks vs AK-47's. "Gun Control" in the musket era is materially different than an era of AK-47's and drones. Same with data processing.
Keep in mind, these are Mb, not Gb!
Nowadays with a raspberry pi and a 128gb SD card you can go to town on "all location data for the last year for all American cell phones".
Back in 1994, even coordinating reliable central writes of all that location data would have been extraordinarily complicated, and there was not yet a panopticon appetite that would attempt the endeavor without a heavily funded psychopath behind it.
As "we the industry" have gotten more capable (and comfortable) processing huge quantities of data (eg: post map-reduce), and the hardware requirements have fallen to "my cell phone could compute it in an hour", the risk has increased tremendously.
Same story with muskets, cannons and tanks vs AK-47's. "Gun Control" in the musket era is materially different than an era of AK-47's and drones. Same with data processing.