> How do people not understand that some laws only make sense at a certain scale?

Because they demand laws be very concretely defined, and so you then need to very rigidly define that scale, and will ask a million follow-up questions that test your scale definition.

But of course, it's all bullshit. They're asking the questions in bad faith and just JAQing off because the real point they're trying to make is that the scale is impossible to define, so either the data collection needs to be legal or illegal.