I completely agree. The GDPR had the best of intentions, but did not materially improve data privacy online. Meanwhile it has absolutely made the UX of the web worse.
I know what the responses will be: "its a great law with poor enforcement". Perhaps that's true, but if so what makes us think additional EU tech regulations will be any better enforced?
I personally saw drastic improvements. I remember marketing adding or rotating trackers every 3 months as they got pitches from random companies.
Those basically vanished the day we had to keep track of which company stored their data in which region, and where in the privacy policy list we had to slot them.
User data still goes to Google or Adobe, but getting rid of all the weird scammy players is a win in my book.
And it also helped justify investing in stronger internal data management and analysis instead.
Basically adding random third party libraries suddenly had a material cost, and I don't see any other initiative that could have realistically reached that result.
I know what the responses will be: "its a great law with poor enforcement". Perhaps that's true, but if so what makes us think additional EU tech regulations will be any better enforced?