It has long been known that it is hard to link actual events of identity theft with known occasions of data breaches. With notable exceptions matching up actual victims to actual data breaches just doesn't happen often. What consumers who read this should as a precursor understand, is that there are different types of data breaches. These are distinguished by the nature of the data breach. Since methodology of theft of data is only marginally accounted for in notification laws and in data breach publicity, the study referred to above may be skewed based upon this factor.
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There's more data than there used to be,
there's more demand to steal that data,
there's less sophisticated protectors than there used to be.
All of this is a prescription for results that look worse than they really are, in terms of an overall situation.