A technical solution is good, but it only protects the tech savvy. The GDPR gives us several additional guarantees compared to the technical solution:

- It protects everyone equally.

- It shifts the incentives towards not collecting, since the data becomes a liability.

- It empowers citizen to know what was collected through the use of GDPR requests. It further allows the citizen to know what that data was used for.

- It allows citizens to ask the collecting entity to remove any and all data they have about them.

- Finally, it allows legal recourse when data that was never supposed to get collected inevitably leaks.

So there are multiple things the GDPR does that a purely technical solution does not provide. As usual, the best protection is to have both. Used ublock, didn’t give consent, but still suspect foul play? Send the company a GDPR request, and if data was collected, ask for it to be deleted (and additionally report it to your gdpr regulation entity).

Also:

> - Too many websites place tracking cookies first and then let you disable them.

>

> - Too many apps use some kind of analytics without any consent

I’m pretty sure both of those are straight up illegal, thanks to the cookie law and the GDPR.