We aren't reaching for it casually. Some of us consider privacy a fundamental value that must be defended, and regard an attack on our privacy with the same seriousness that we would regard an attack on our physical person.
Which is more of a danger to me, someone who punches me in the face on their drunk night out and gives me a bloody lip and a bit of pain for a few hours, or someone who betrays confidences that may have lifelong implications for my employability, insurance premiums and credit levels, ability to travel freely, and for that matter my self-respect and basic human dignity, before you even get to the kinds of more extreme and very physical dangers that could be posed by invasions of privacy if we consider the lessons of history?
The severity of a punishment can be tuned separately from the form of punishment. Imprisonment is not appropriate merely by dint of your emotional reaction to the crime itself.
>Which is more of a danger to me...
Sufficient to warrant throwing them in a cage, being brutalized by actually violent criminals, imposing a direct cost burden on society, and also indirectly by depriving society of that individual's productivity?
Probably neither.
As an individual, one could well go to prison for such misbehaviour. Corporate and government employment should not serve as an impenetrable shield and dilution of responsibility against such eventuality.
Incarceration is often described as having two goals: Punishment for crimes committed, and mitigation against such crimes. For the latter, both by actual restraint and by aversion to the potential results.
It seems that stronger aversion is needed; we have a systemic problem with recurrence -- often by the same parties -- of this behaviour.
However, let me be clear: if the facts in this case really are as I've seen reported, then I have no problem with taking people who did this, throwing them in a cage, and depriving society of their "productivity" for a while. As far as I'm concerned, that kind of productivity is about as welcome as the banking executives who command "competitive compensation packages" for running their organisations into the ground or the politicians who once elected proceed to legislate for the highest bidder.
We put blackmailers in to jail, and we should put people who provide enough sensitive material to blackmail an entire city in to jail as well.
OK, how about getting all their personal information and putting it on a public website?
This may be a strange concept to you, but you can commit a crime non-physically. After all, lots of people think bankers should be arrested for having traded bad debt and precipitating the recession.