[mindslight]

You're asking the right questions. Welcome to developing an awareness of the sprawling surveillance industry!

In short there are vanishingly few privacy laws in the US, and the few that do exist are mostly undermined by fake consent in EULA/TOS documents-that-nobody-reads. Even when a company somehow does manage to run aground of some law, they generally just end up with financial slap on the wrist while keeping their ill gotten data gains.

The best time to push for meaningful privacy legislation was over the past 40 years when all of these surveillance databases were being built out. But the second best time is now, especially as more people gain awareness of how pervasive and invasive this totalitarian industry has become. The records being created and kept by this industry would make a dyed in the wool Stasi agent blush, and Americans need to start rejecting this fallacious narrative that things that are reasonable for individuals to do at a small bespoke passing scale remain legitimate when scaled up to industrial levels.