There's a bit of a difference between normal logging of access to services to protect your devices / network (and to understand your users' access to your services), and using every nasty trick in the book to build extensive detailed profiles of everyone's browsing footprint across the entire web, often without their knowledge or consent (hence the laws, because it's the only way to convince some folks to not do bad things). The first should be expected behavior, whereas the second should be considered unacceptable and abusive, but has somehow been "normalized" in modern society.

It's a difference of degree, not kind, which is how it became normalized.