"Americans are biased toward thinking of bad things as being already illegal, always illegal, illegal by definition and by nature and in themselves. If the thing that Facebook did was so bad, then it must have been illegal, so there is no need for a new law against it. At most we need a settlement with Facebook clarifying exactly which things it did were illegal and specifying that it won’t do them again."

Before Mark Zuckerberg (and possibly now Google), we didn't really have anyone abusing personal data to such an extent that what they are doing is clearly, to the average person, wrong. Dumping toxic waste into waterways/letting it reach the groundwater is probably a similar example.

Every now and again an individual, company or industry comes along who is callous enough to make money off the things that surely must be illegal before and until they actually are.