The common law arguably put the question you ask in the hands of a jury.[1] It is public figures whose lives are fodder for public consumption; more generous privacy rules traditionally have applied for the more mediocre among us.

[1] https://law.jrank.org/pages/9409/Privacy-Common-Law.html

Sadly, I'm inclined to agree with your assessment, from my utterly amateur legal armchair.

We need new laws for this. GDPR is a good start, if one happens to be an EU citizen, if a bit toothless.

We need new laws because automated collection of vast amounts of personal data, at scale, is a thing different in kind from manually collecting personal data about a specific person. Due to the expense and difficulty, the earlier system would tend to scale broadly with someone's fame, or at least wealth, which matches our expectations: it's not surprising that, say, a gossip magazine would have a fat file on Leonardo DiCaprio, and we figure he has lawyers on hand to deal with any consequent fallout.

In fact, we all used to be quite grateful for the unsung laborers who would collect and publish a doxxing book, called the white pages, which would list the names, phone numbers, and addresses, of most local people. Of course they were legally obligated to unlist those who requested it...

> We need new laws for this. GDPR is a good start, if one happens to be an EU citizen, if a bit toothless.

It actually has a better bite than most. The problem is that the one suposed to do the biting doesn't do a lot of it.