this could not be timed worse for Tumblr which is in huge hot water with its userbase already for its CEO breaking his sabbatical to ban a prominent trans user for allegedly threatening him (in a cartoonish manner), and then spending a week personally justifying it increasingly wildly across several platforms. the rumors had already been swirling that this would occur, but this just cements that they were correct
I agree completely, it is ridiculous and should be stopped immediately, but I don’t see a way this problem can be fixed. EU is trying, for example after GDPR all these cookies became horrendously annoying. What you’re suggesting will lead to clearer and possibly lengthier EULA or TOS documents but in essence we would still have to either agree with them or not use that service. While a lot of open source and self hosted options exist to replicate many of the services, but you can’t rely yet on that for everything.
You can sure as hell double down on strict privacy settings and use a lot of privacy friendly options like librewolf, mull, private dns, nextcloud, matrix/jabber, VPNs, immich, better search engines, Open street maps, and OSes like arch and Graphene.
The EU is trying to legitimise it, which is completely the wrong take.
I think one of either two courses of action should be taken by lawmakers. Either:
Data has value, it is completely unacceptable that this value is taken without consideration.
Good luck, the current state of user data and privacy is the reason USA intelligence agencies don’t have to do any work to enact their blackmail and manipulation campaigns. It won’t get fixed.