We went down the rabbit hole a very long time ago, why is it only now that people are starting to realise what it means?
I am not surprised at all. The mainstream moves very, very slowly. You see the same with musical genres. EDM, for instance, took 20-30 years to go mainstream in the US and it is still a relatively young market.
With a website like facebook that can track a browser on most webpages , having to find a person internet history would be just a SQL query away and the results would be back in a few milliseconds, so IMO FB and Google tracking are very different then what you described.
Also because of convenience people ignored this until the US election issue, that pushed a real problem in the spotlight and regular people now get amazed but what Fb can do.
Because Trump won, and we're still trying to figure out who to blame.
Love or hate Trump, the election is what motivated these inquiries. Just listen to the hearings internationally.