Big data is different, has different threat models, and needs to be treated differently.

Technically, in 1960, you could pay a huge number of people to listen to a huge number of telephones or watch a huge number of cameras, but it was so insanely expensive that unless you were in East Germany or Moscow it wasn't a threat you had to consider.

Cheap cameras and cheap hard drives and LLM vision processing models which mean that you can have a permanent archive of every license plate or face that went by a location mean that things are very different and even though things were legally possible before, it's a totally different problem now.