If a corporation chooses to, there are numerous ways they can ruin you, with little to nothing a human can do about it. The legal system is stacked to trust corporate entities far beyond the legal power a single citizen or any family of private citizens that may try to defend them. Most criminals never actually generate the notice of a corporation for their interest to focus on them. They are very aware of organized crime, but there is little corporations can do about them. However, the economic combat taking place in some industries actually is the stuff of espionage spy novels.
This thread has a lot of sensor speculation about what if scenarios. As a person working in FR and security, I can tell you we already have giant databases with millions of people in them. They are actively searched 24/7 with cameras located in public high traffic areas. Private spaces are filled with them. Retail is filled with them. You already see the cameras everywhere and do not think about it. We have systems that can search a 8 billion facial records on a single server in under 10 seconds, working with more realistic sized galleries, we have deployed and operating systems performing real time searching of everyone in a sports stadium or retail mall repeated 30 times a second for the duration of the public use of the space.
It will probably turn out just like the rest of the history of the internet - as a huge "public/private partnership" (/s)
FB/Google jump on the train and enable new possibilities you don't want to miss, meanwhile Government gets nothing done, so in the end the three letter agencies will just arrive at the doorstep snagging all data anyway (formerly known as PRISM).
I mean why go to the trouble of installing expensive hardware identifying anyone if they all incriminate themselves for free on Snapchat?
