That is the problem: we have nothing to hide until someone changes the law. Suddenly those things that were legal yesterday become the crimes of today.
And as their data was harvested, consumers were told: Relinquish your private data to us, it's a fine and normal thing to do, we are trustworthy corporate citizens and privacy is a concern expressed only by those who wear hats of tinfoil.
There is no respect for the context in which the data was generated.
It will sure seem retroactive to someone who might have acted differently so the data wouldn't be available to be handed over, if the current laws were in action at the point they could have done something to avoid the data being collected¹².
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[1] "Generated" is too benign a word here IMO, hence using "collected" instead
[2] "inferred" might be a better choice as the data could be incorrect³ but that still seems to imply less agency than the companies have in their very deliberate stalky behaviour
[3] so something made up, not a truth collected
As it happens the Dutch authorities were pretty good with collecting ethnicity and confessional data in the inter-war period, then the very bad guys came along and we know what followed.
Data collection at scale and especially data centralization has always been a mistake, too bad many of the livelihoods of us here depend on exactly that.
