The law should not have had the consent provision. Without consent provisions, the law makes a fine general prohibition on unnecessary use of personal data,† al

The law should not have had the consent provision. Without consent provisions, the law makes a fine general prohibition on unnecessary use of personal data,† albeit with a few kinks that I'm glossing over with "unnecessary". But it has the outlines of a sensible regulation, the corner cases could surely have been smoothed out in court. The consent provision ruins everything. The fact of its existence reframes otherwise unlawful processing as "you need to get consent" instead of "you shouldn't be doing this", which is how it should be framed. It turns the whole regulation into a farce, restricting data processing to necessary uses except if you have the ability to document and semi-coerce consent (subtly enough to not invalidate the content you've obtained, but empirically that's clearly not closely examined). And lo, a parasite industry dedicated to coercing and documenting "consent"! †Just talking article 6 here, I don't really want to get into the weeds of chapter 3.