Better to have this in the public eye, than to be too scared to carry out the research in fear of others abusing it. because whether the research is done publicly or not, the "bad guys" are probably doing it in private.
Now, big tech companies putting it everywhere, and either convincing the stores I shop at or my neighbors to pay for the hardware and slurping up the data - that is a real danger case. And those companies build off academic research like this. Even trillion-dollar companies don't do as much of this research inhouse as they do by sponsoring grants like this.
Nation states worry me precisely because I'm uninteresting. They wouldn't deploy hardware against me, but I'm under no illusion that they wouldn't use every mass-surveillance option available to them, including mass exploitation of commodity hardware.
I agree wholeheartedly with the rest of your post.
I can't tell if you mean that most nation state espionage resources are spent keeping a watchful eye on the U.S. since they see the U.S. as aggressive and dangerous, or you mean that literally American citizens are aggressive and dangerous (i.e. perhaps due to prevalence of firearms with non-conformist, anti-government, anti-authority views), that the U.S. spends much of its own resources spying on its own citizens?
I’d hate for my town counsel to spy on me simply because they can with off the shelf hardware, that the military developed and deemed obsolete 10 years ago.
I've worked on systems designed to send in-store customers custom, extremely time limited (< 1 hour) coupons based on where they are in the store and where they linger. Linger time being used as an indicator of purchase intent for a specific item. This does require that the customer has the store's app installed and running.
It’s much easier and cheaper to just record what shelve/height/area products are placed in and reconcile that data with sales. The data will be more noisy, but you can capture so much more valuable information for the same investment. You can also usually apply the models in retrospect, since most larger chains already record where products are supposed to be.
Cameras are really only used at corporate test stores in small numbers. Camera data is usually looked at manually and only focuses on a specific product or area.