Europe has strict privacy protections that limit the use of personal information, but America is more lightly regulated, allowing the sale of huge troves of consumer data to any company or candidate who can afford them. (nytimes.com)
Applications include helping companies improve driverless vehicles by allowing them to analyze huge troves of visual traffic data, or it could help factories improve automation. (fortune.com)
There's a derogatory term in Silicon Valley for companies that amass huge troves of patents and make money by threatening lawsuits: «patent trolls.» (thisamericanlife.org)