Ignore him. This is one of the classic responses to any challenge of the status quo. If you don’t like the way things are then you should upend your entire life, go live in a cave, subsist on bugs and stop challenging my world view.

Tl;dr He was trying to sound helpful while telling you to go fuck yourself.

I was doing no such thing. I was simply telling him the only realistic way to cut down on third-party tracking.

Using uBlock Origin, uMatrix, or NoScript gets you very far in this regard. You don't need to whitelist that many scripts on each site before they start functioning.

It may, but unfortunately you have limited choices. You can also browse in an incognito window, which will at least disable tracking from session to session. However, even then your IP address is being associated with certain behaviors.

The reality is that you have a choice: use the Internet and have some tracking happen, or don't use it at all. Even the GDPR doesn't stop tracking - it just requires better disclosure of it and mandates certain handling procedures for the data that is collected on the backend.

If you just have a dislike for certain websites tracking you, you can use the Windows (or other) firewall to block specific domains as I stated above.

Firefox has support for multiple profiles! I have a profile that I only use for Facebook, Gmail, and Twitter, and one that I use for everything else. Probably not perfect, but provides more isolation.

I beg to disagree. GDPR doesnt stop the tracking but forces the one doing the tracking to get your opt-in, FREELY given consent for each and every use of private data. And if you require consent, this is then not freely given and in such case invalid (forget about trackwalls).

(I am not talking about criminals here, they wont care)

Effectively this means that if user doesnt want to be tracked you wont track it. And that you cant load facebook button on your page if you dont get consent (or you are liable for lawsuit, by user and, the more interesting part, by facebook as you are providing them with illegal data.

Please read this, you are taking GDPR much too shallow... it is not and quite a few companies will have problems as they were too lazy to read the GDPR but were rather relying on messed up opinions on the internet.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-stjktAu-7k