The problem is not individual bad people or bad companies. Take out the ones that exist now and a sea of new adtech startups will take their place.
Can you not imagine a scenario where we didn’t leave everything in the hands of a completely unregulated market?
We have (kinda) world wide copyright laws. We have world wide drug laws. We have world wide sea and war laws. Why don't we have world wide privacy laws?
... which get flouted all the time
> We have world wide drug laws.
... And the war on drugs has been a huge success.
> Why don't we have world wide privacy laws?
The Internet makes trying to enforce world wide privacy laws much harder than physical laws: anyone in the world can reach you and collect data about you.
> Just make it outright illegal and fine heavily per violation. You have profile information that a user didn't explicitly give you? $10k fine, each.
How do you propose to discover violations? Self-reporting won't ever happen. If you then propose to give draconian sanctions to trying to cover up such issues, congratulations, you've killed the ability of people to build anything and share it with the world.
Is robbing ok, because if you don't do it, someone else might?
Not really. European Union services are more regulated towards user rights (GDPR) and services from other big countries are usually targeted towards domestic or regional market (typically East-Asian apps for example).