The Guardian story has gone viral, thankfully leading to some good commentary and Jamie Bartlett, from Demos:
The first is that this is not really a story.....The idea that the police and intelligence agencies might be interested in the possible applications for their work – crime, trends, early warning, situational awareness – is hardly new or surprising.
Rightly he notes a debate is needed:
what this story does is raise an important point about how new technology makes surveillance far easier – and how the law needs to change in response. It is now far easier for the state to access personal information that we citizens happily put into the public domain.
Link:http://www.demos.co.uk/blog/googlefo...rdlysurprising

Note I believe the focus of such technology is within the Western democracies, both for pre-emption and maybe for historical analysis. How much electronic data do the people of Mali generate? Plus is the data, beyond traffic analysis, actually in a language the user can understand?