Single family used to act as a check on greed. Careless institutional investment was limited to multi family. They couldn’t push multi family rents beyond single family. Once institutional got into single family, everything became uncapped. It’s harder for millions of small landlords competing for tenants to act as a cartel than it is for a few large landlords taking up marginal supply.
I think all of these privacy problems can be traced back to contract law and contracts of adhesion where consumers are automatically opted into terms consumers would never wittingly opt into voluntarily.