Tech companies are richer than some entire nations.

Data is literally the new gold and you can bet your profile is being sold and bought for all kinds of statistical analysis.

To what areas to send flyers, what voting region to draw. From how likely you are to become a potential terrorist. If you have a pattern of consuming that can be reinforced showing an ad at the right time. Or if you have such low income and high debt they don't need to bother except if they are a predatory money lending service, then they may give you a personal call.

If there exists data on it then businesses are made specifically to exploit that data.

But of course you’ll never see or hear what happens to your specific data. Your not supposed to know your being mined for profit and sold to the highest bidding manipulator.

Of course that is being used. What do you think the user profiles of the ad-tech by Google and Facebook are being trained on? Big data ist just tech to manage all that data they generate by spying on us.

Problem with big data is that it takes a lot of time and effort to sift through it to get any value out of it.

Companies dream that they can enable predictive maintenance by using the big data from your collected data, but in reality its easier said than done, so they end up failing because of the price.

And I doubt the current level of AI can provide better results than a bunch of search parameters, I would be worried if the result is hallucinated, and still need some search parameters to verify the result.

The thing is, the outcome of big data is not any one defined thing as well as not any one defined goal. This is why AI is being pushed for everything since we dont know if they can do it unless we try.

I wouldn't be surprised if the customer fart data is used to help diagnose medical issues.

All that info is sitting in some dusty database mostly unused.