It's incredible how deep the ideological split is, on data protection and surveillance. On one side, you have lawyers saying "hey, this is a problem, this law says you can't do that, we have to find ways to make you comply"; and on the other you have business lobbies and security agencies saying "hey, this is a problem, we need to remove all laws".
Restricting laws are always costly: Environment laws for example -- how costly it is, not to be able to pollute the air, the water, the people. Have filters, have restrictions, use of alternative fuels ... this all costs. And reduces the growth rates of our economies .... Better remove those laws and instead install strict intellectual property laws with unrestricted duration of protection.
That is, how (capitalistic) economy works: Put the costs of the business on the shoulder of many (the people of the country) and the benefits (the profits) on few people.
It isn't 'how' it works. It's something along with other many many things we may like or dislike, that happens in our complicated world. Evidently you can't resist the opportunity to push a political agenda.
Well, in terms of economic theory, he has a point. Markets usually don't take into account so-called externalities such as the environmental impacts of pollution (or individual loss of privacy) when setting prices. Perhaps a better way to view environmental (or data-protection) legistation is not as constraining the untrammelled workings of the free market, but as modifying the market mechanisms themselves to take certain externalities into account, so that they get factored into production costs instead of being passed on to society.
