Those companies choose to operate in the EU, if they don't like the legal environment they can just pack up and leave. Why do you think they don't do that? Why do you feel the need to defend companies breaking the law?
spend a lot of time and money moving your things there
live there for a decade
the landlord shows up and informs you that you are forbidden from using the toilet between 6 PM and 8 PM, effective immediately, punishable by a fine equal to your monthly income. why? fuck you, that's why. if you don't like the legal environment you can just pack up and leave
As far as I hear from the HN crowd if the company feels it's not profitable anymore they will just pack up and leave (hence why many here defend not taxing corporations), this is exactly that case: there's money to be made, they will stick around, perhaps realising that paying fines is eating into their profits and change behaviour. If they don't like it, just pack up and leave, corporations are only interested in making profits, housing is not an analogous to that as much as you might want to play that card.
Pretend you're a normal person.
Secretly snoop on all the phone calls, conversations, documents in the whole house.
Take creepy pictures and upload them "for later"
Monitor all the internet traffic in the house, for all the other inhabitants.
Throw a hissy fit when you're fined for knowingly, blatantly breaking the law for years (and sometimes lying about that).
https://wire.com/en/blog/metas-stealth-tracking-another-eu-w...
But these privacy-violating actions are completely optional, so optional in fact you need to go very far out of the way to implement them. Most of them rely on shady pseudo-vulnerabilities, which may be patched at any point. And they sometimes are - I mean, entire businesses have been killed by this sort of thing.
It's risky. You're relying on the legislator, yes, but you're also relying on platforms. If your revenue rides on some rare, convoluted "feature" in Chrome, for instance, Google can fix that at any point and you're fucked.
So just stop doing that. It's a bad idea. These companies need to find more reliable and ethical revenue streams. If you do volatile shit then yeah, it's volatile.