I don't honestly know why I didn't see this, specifically, coming. However it is now a developing industry apparently.
There was an incident locally with a drone spending hours lottering around the area early am and late pm. At night. A big drone, fully lit with navs and strobes. Most likely operating "above board" given the hours of operation being outside of the local airports hours of operation and it was operating within "the zone" so to speak.
Several people in comments reported that it was a marketing drone which was trying to identify how many "scooters / mopeds" where operating in the area. Alegedly this was to support market research which was aiming to push electric scooters to under 21s in the area. They wanted to know how big the market was in this specific area.
I cannot confirm this was the purposes of the drone operating. The local police also have drones and there were several large drug raids concurrent with the dates and times.
However. I did google a bit to see how realistic this is/was. Turns out it is quite realistic. I found a dozen different "Drone-vertising" service providers who are willing to do "data gathering missions" for marketing. That includes both photo tracking with AI to identify "things" but also scanning "Network neighbourhoods", "Cataloguing and categorising connected devices". So they overfly a city or area and come back with a map of all the devices that responded to the drones beacons, pings or whatever.
Technological aspects are fascinating. I don't think they have ever touched on the potential of that approach towards 24/7 market surveillance.
The privacy, security and legal aspects make my eyes water.... and my blood boil.