Yes, we are at the primitive end of history, even the first transistor is still within living memory. What these breaches do is normalize the loss of privacy, the protection of which eats into the profits that fuel the growth of the companies that collect it, and threaten their foundational roles in this early history. That this is early in the game is also why protective laws need to be passed for people to retain the power over their own information. Data is not as cheap as the law treats it, Google makes almost $100MM every week.

Furthermore, how much time do these breaches steal in lost productivity, or in diminished free time, for all of us? Quite a bit, but the only time you hear about that metric is when management is complaining about employees talking to each other in the hallway.

Protections not established early become harder to impose later, which is why the companies and lawmakers to which they donate downplay the severity of these breaches via pittances of penalties, 30min of revenues or something. Fines should be $1000 per individual exfiltrated, or a year of revenues (at last year's number), or other figure that would be actually effective...and with strict liability.