With the billions of records breached this year alone, I'm feeling quite apathetic to these stories now. My theory is that the lack of punishment is intentiona

With the billions of records breached this year alone, I'm feeling quite apathetic to these stories now. My theory is that the lack of punishment is intentional for just such a purpose, in a collusion between government and industry to milk all of us for free data about every aspect of our lives, from the past into the future. They're just going to take it. You see, people won't demand privacy protections enshrined in law if they simply don't give a shit anymore. Companies don't incur liability, people get some free "credit monitoring" service that should be provided by default. None of this does anything about the leaked data being used to market to you, manipulate your votes, or worse. Then, at the end of the day Facebook et al doesn't have to worry about their contributory privacy violations at all. If you don't want your private messages sold (rented) to every spammer on Earth, what are you gonna do about it? What's the business case for caring on their part?