But banking regulation still has an effect on any entity that can't afford to be continuously fighting lawsuits and paying fines.

And actual changes happens on many of these cases. An entity getting fined three of four times for different offenses doesn't mean they never fix any of the issues.

An easy example could be Google, who've been a target of so many of these complaints, and made many adjustment, up to building separate data centers with separate management rules to deal with the EU situation.

These regulations are so overwrought, complex, and even contradictory, that it is literally impossible to comply with them fully. Hence fines.

Are you in a position where you would know firsthand whether big tech data collection is trending up or down, or if not, could you share the research you've done to reach your conclusion? It seems plausible to me that the fines and other penalties have forced changes in how some companies operate, based on the large fines (absolute value, not % of revenue...) that have made the news in the past five-ish years.

There has been sweeping changes in log management, data export to outside entities, reliance on third party providers to parse that data and come up with insights etc.

Pre-GDPR, you'd open your logs to any random company promising to come up with something that could remotely help your marketing department. Nowadays, you'll have to vet your partners and audit how your data is handled internally. It's hard to come up with concrete examples when it's basically every single company above a decent size, as they typically don't want to work against the law.

Same for the retention period, the very type of log that you'd open for internal harvesting (you could still be collecting the info, but keep it way more confidential to the point no one outside of your SRE team has access to the totality of it)

It's as if you were asking what changes the PSI and DSS compliance laws had on the card processing field.