Why is it you think the government cares where you are?
I was responding to “you can run, but you cannot hide” and agreeing with it.
If pressed to hazard a guess, I’d say that collection of taxes would be one reason. Beyond that, the ability to create what we used to call sociograms that reveal your social interactions must have a reason. With all the data-gathering technology available that can read your ID from a chip in a driver’s license, passport or credit card or the GPS tracking available via cell phone, _someone_ seems to want to be able to track us.
Perhaps there is another reason for all the data mining on the web besides just knowing what to sell us and where we would be most likely to purchase it, not to mention who we might be meeting up with, which can be determined from comparing the various tracking data common to any group of individuals? They know the products you buy and where you buy them. Social networks and emails reveal your personal associations.
If your various cards/phone pass within range of an RF reader, you are identified. Mobile scanners are being used to see if someone is carrying in public. In some large cities, you can also be tracked via the ubiquitous cameras and, in some places, via drone. Your IP identifies your location when you post or go online from any platform.
That is the data collection part. Data storage is becoming very cheap. Large centers exist and more are being built just to store that data. Many of these data storage centers are run by the government intelligence services. The government wants access to the private data storage.
Why go to all this effort if there wasn’t some purpose behind knowing where people are, where they are going, what they are doing and with whom they are doing it?
Perhaps they have no interest in any one individual at the moment, but they foresee a time when they would.
Read “Minority Report”. Dick was writing before all this tracking was so readily available. The book differs from the movie.