Oh I'm not trying to defend these practices in the least. But at least there is some mechanism (public outrage) there to make them think about it. That these me

Oh I'm not trying to defend these practices in the least. But at least there is some mechanism (public outrage) there to make them think about it. That these mechanisms seem to fail and we need proper regulation is a different matter. Also in a lot of cases it's not really clear which tangible monetary benefit companies get from spying on their customers. Many cases seem to be managerial paranoia (Just in case the customers pirate!) or "because we can." Pirating and re-packaging software for torrent is also a non-negligible amount of work, and with no revenue stream besides bundling the apps with malware. So it's quite a different incentive structure still.