A lot of the tracking technology is developing from the advertising space, but also to monetize clicks for affiliate commissions. It's the same technology applied to an adjacent market.
The throughput, latency, computing power and memory wasn't sufficient to do what we can do today a short 5-10 years ago. The hardware has advanced so much over the past decade that it is attainable at the consumer/non-sovereign level now. Anyone with a thousand bucks free monthly cash flow and the coding chops can get very far independently.
http://www.viglink.com/
The throughput, latency, computing power and memory wasn't sufficient to do what we can do today a short 5-10 years ago. The hardware has advanced so much over the past decade that it is attainable at the consumer/non-sovereign level now. Anyone with a thousand bucks free monthly cash flow and the coding chops can get very far independently.