>That information is also accessible by looking at the parking lot with your human eyes.

There's a blindingly obvious and enormous difference between some random joe the doughnut-grubbing cop watching a Home Depot parking lot to see if certain cars enter it, and digital license plate surveillance data on all cars entering said lot being constantly mass-sent to some federal or corporate-federal database for correlation with reams of other data shared by these same companies and other sources.

Guess where the latter can indeed easily lead? To exactly what you dismiss.

This. After cell phone and internet carriers, retail financial providers, social media, data brokers, and AFRs and ALPRs from retail and commercial security systems will inevitably lead to for-profit intelligence fusion, especially when many $10B's of paramilitary/intelligence budget go shopping.