The alternative perspective you're presenting sounds to me utterly cavalier about the prospect of ruining people's lives. It's like Equifax's attitude towards identity theft: it doesn't affect their profitability, so why care?

It's because such blithe dismissal of the damage caused by data gathering is so prevalent in the industry that the likelihood of devastating compromise is so high and the costs borne by the populace are spiraling upwards.

Some data should never be collected. Some data should never even be uploaded.