zlacker

I didn't mean it quite literally, and specified that I'm not suggesting that police had something like this in mind. My uneducated guess is that police were after something specific relating to other information that they already had. That's generally how police investigations work.

That said, the one relatively broad concept where "we" consistently do better than random guesses is ad-tech, which is where the bulk of private efforts to this effect are concentrated currently. The premise here is quite literally "every data point is predictive of behaviour," behaviour being stuff related to the goals of advertisers.

It's not a huge leap to suggest that fb & adwords' system can be used to predict crime, insurance claims, HR-related stuff etc.