Second-author here, I have a few rebuttals to these points. First, there is also a wider pattern in the US when it comes to privacy/computer legislation. We t

Second-author here, I have a few rebuttals to these points. First, there is also a wider pattern in the US when it comes to privacy/computer legislation. We tend to have sectoral-focused laws which are often a response to media events, real and fictional. For example, Computer Fraud and Abuse Act was a response to the movie War Games. Video Privacy Protection Act was in response to a supreme court nominee's video rental history being leaked to the press. Children's Online Privacy Protection Act was partially spurned by concerted reporting (sometimes sensational) on risks to children online. So the pattern you are seeing is part of a larger system which often does produce real change, it is just a slow process. The press is called the "fourth estate" because they play an important part in the democratic process, which is what you are observing here. Second, it is the very ubiquity of the systems these companies deploy which makes it possible to choose a given context (health, sex, etc) and find a privacy-violating technology. I'd love it if when I did these scans I turned up nothing, but the same set of bad actors are always to be found. Likewise, the definition of "well-known" on hacker news is far, far, far different from what a normal Internet user has any clue of. We have 20+ years of research showing people fundamentally don't understand this stuff, and just because you don't have a CS degree doesn't mean you don't have privacy rights. Last, there is very good reason for outrage for many people. There are many places in the world you can be killed for being LGBTQ. Likewise, there are many state intelligence agencies that piggy-back on online tracking (see NSA/Doubleclick cookie), and some governments actively go after LGBTQ people. Even without state intel there is a long history of sexual data being leaked online. People killed themselves as a direct result of the Ashely Madison leak, and if any of these tracking companies porn sites - many of which do not have the security team of a FAANG - get hacked, people who are already marginalized by their societies may be at extreme risk.