I was only answering for the Amazon case... the rest comes down to two things, in terms of home security, it's mostly driven by the consumer demand. As to general surveillance at larger levels part of it is maximizing the fractions of a penny. I mean, if you can sell a piece of data for a fraction of a cent, but have 50 billion fractions to sell, that's a pretty big hunk of change.

There are also those genuinely concerned over $STATE$ security and working towards that as a goal.

I'm not condoning or supporting or rejecting for that matter any of the above. But it really doesn't take too much to see several reasons why this stuff happens.

As to the losses in relation to retail stores... retail stores generally have higher margins, and they still hire security staff and put up cameras.