A necessary evil.
It has been for a long time.
Yeah, I agree. The point is though that companies (And ergo, as agreed the Government has access as well) to all sorts of information that may not sound definitive, but in the hands of the right analyst can be as good as being tailed by an experienced private eye.
I’m actually talking to a client of mine right now about Instagram. Instagram not only has access to the photo EXIF data (Which includes lat/lon) but also will analyse the photo for greens to tell what kind of plants are in the photo. It will analyse furniture, shadows, and of course faces.
From all of that data one can tell where photos are being taken. That goes in a dataset.