QEMU makes it pretty painless to hook up gdb just FYI; you should look into that. I think you can also have it provide a memory mapped UART for I/O which you can use with newlib to get printf debugging

Sadly they totally can. There are plenty of face databases already that they could use if they wanted^[1], but if you have friends on Facebook (or Instagram) you might be in their pictures and Facebook run it’s facial recognition on every picture. Whether they can connect that to an identity or not isn’t something I know, but it’s not out of the realm of possibility.

Tangentially related, I remember over ten years ago getting notified that I could tag myself in friends uploaded pictures that I was in, which was also when I started to get really creeped out by Facebook.