Sometimes mathematics and physics provide superior solutions than man-made laws. Encryption for example. It's better to make something impossible, than to have laws that are routinely ignored by law enforcement.

>You can’t solve social problems with technical solutions.

Sure, this has a fair amount of truth to it. However, security is not a social problem, it's an economic one. No one, not even the most well funded and skilled organizations like the NSA, has access to infinite resources. Whether a given attack/data harvesting effort costs $1 million, $10 thousand, $100, $1, or $0.01 makes an enormous difference in impact. Can a given three letter agency afford to spend $1m on anyone? Sure. Can they afford it against everyone? No. Same with private orgs, if harvesting data costs $10000/person, it has to generate well over that much money in profit to make it worth it. Is that likely on average? Probably not. If it costs fractions of a cent, then they will be incentivized to scale it as hard as possible, since payoff from even one person will cover thousands of duds.

So sure, by all means we should pursue laws too, as that also shifts costs a bit. But there is zero reason not to simultaneously pursue technical means to make costs as high as possible. Both tracks matter a lot.