1. You are not entitled to any of the profits of the company by owning stock. Not even if you own preferred stock.
2. You have virtually no control over decisions the company makes. And your vote may not count as much as someone else who has the same number of shares as you. Furthermore, you can have no voting privileges at all as well while owning stocks.
3. A company can devalue the shares you own by simply issuing more (similar to governments printing money).
Not only is all this legal, this is normal. For the average person, the only real reason to own shares is to hope the value goes up. In a few cases it is to get dividends from the companies that have a track record of paying out, but the RoR is not particularly good.
There strict laws about that sort of things even more so in places like Germany and the UK