Perhaps it is, but this doesn't mean it should be, nor that we can afford to leave it this way forever. It's a government agencies' job and we should rather fix them to the extent so they can do this job efficiently enough. Today the world has became so wild of information abusers that maintaining privacy/anonymity becomes a necessity even for a lawful good person to stay safe. This is why we really need trusted policing parties to be the only who have our data, this became important like never before and will only grow more important. Perhaps an alternative can be in creating licensed private agencies (to build competition and have agencies incentivized enough) and penalizing their wrongdoings severely so they think carefully before any move they do to make sure it can't destroy anyone's life unnecessarily. Even besides intentionally malevolent parties, any bullshit "journalist" from anywhere in the world can carelessly present your data in a catastrophically harmful way for sake of hype and click-bait and suing them (let alone neutralizing the harm they've done) will probably be nonviable for you.

> One sort of amusing example from recent memory: https://www.npr.org/2019/06/06/730375237/nyc-operation-meltd...

To me defrauding the New York City (a $886 billion GDP entity) for $4.5 million in fines it potentially could have collected seems harmless enough to leave it unpunished when the alternative is to endanger every single person to loose comparable amounts (even when they don't have this much so they go negative). To me it seems more important to protect an ordinary human (e.g. under $10 mil. net worth so they can't hire an army of lawyers, enforcers and influences and give them a carte-blanche) from their life being ruined than protecting a multibillion dollar bureaucratic entity which just didn't care to build a system reliable enough to prevent some millions in lost profit from leaking through its fingers.