I hope it's teaching us that the next time some ivory tower bureaucrats suggest something, we'll assume they're full of shit and make it a lot harder for them to pull this kind of garbage.
That's not the law, that's the implementation that's the issue. The same EU body quoted above has passed the message for a long time that that's not needed eg for purely technical cookies.
If your takeaway is that GDPR is the problem in this equation, I can do nothing other than strongly disagree. It quite possibly could be better drafted, but oh boy is personal data hoarding by companies a huge problem, and would certainly not be lesser without oversight.
Why do you think "personal data hoarding" a huge problem?
I see it as MY data and YOUR data is pretty worthless. Aggregate data has value, but then that doesn't contain much insight about any individual at all.
Isn't it true that the more people's data you have, the less it says about any individual?
