Finishing that line of thought gives: "I didn't ask to be protected, so this makes sense to me". Applying the same logic evenly gives me: "I'm very glad someone is keeping these companies in check, so this doesn't make sense to me", which gets us nowhere.
I think we can agree that none of us likes to be taken advantage of, and this law is trying to stop that.
EDIT: P.S. The law actually isn't badly written, and the malicious compliance is _breaking_ it. The law accounts for these kinds of behaviours, it's just that nobody has tested it yet. Though there are people trying to bring the widespread law breaking to the attention of the EU
> I think we can agree that none of us likes to be taken advantage of, and this law is trying to stop that.
The disagreement is over whether paying for information services with your personal data is being taken advantage of. Yes, there's an imbalance of size, and of information, but the attention market is also intensely competitive and - even in social media - switching costs for the consumer are low. A market-oriented solution would have been to sponsor independent organizations to score websites on privacy.
> The disagreement is over whether paying for information services with your personal data is being taken advantage of
Sure, if that was clear then we'd be in agreement. The EU law is aiming to make it clearer that you are indeed "paying" for the use of the website with your privacy.
Personally, I'm happy to pay for services with money, and do so whenever I feel a service is good enough. I'd wager a significant portion of average users would be too, if they knew what was happening with the profiles built up on them.
Putting that aside for a moment: If we paid for services, then it would promote good services. When we pay with our privacy, it promotes more effective data collection that doesn't have anything to do with the service, such as a focus on "engagement" (and everything that entails, that you've already alluded to).
I think we can agree that none of us likes to be taken advantage of, and this law is trying to stop that.
EDIT: P.S. The law actually isn't badly written, and the malicious compliance is _breaking_ it. The law accounts for these kinds of behaviours, it's just that nobody has tested it yet. Though there are people trying to bring the widespread law breaking to the attention of the EU