Why would they care about the consequences of fines, when they themselves don’t have to pay it, they can just cash out and not lose a cent, its the company that gets fined.

Because if you lose a company a substantial amount of money without generating profit for the shareholders then you won’t get an executive position at any other companies.

In 5 - 10 years, we’ll live in the era of mass surveillance

It definitely feels like that. In a lot of ways we’re already there. Stingrays have been around for more than a decade - but of course they’re technically legal.

Technology will always move faster than government, and unfortunately that means technology companies will always find ways to gather data on people with things that we don’t have laws for. The only way I can think to slow that down would be to kill the demand for tracking data, but it seems like every government and major business is into collecting, buying and selling data on human behavior right now so I don’t even have a theory as to how to actually reduce the demand for it. It’s way out of hand.

The best option for individuals right now is to live in a place that has some decent legal restrictions, like the EU or California, and of course vote for politicians who favor privacy regulations.