The people who decided that the new SEPA payments should include a way for creditors to take people's money using just public information and their signature should be fired. It's like they learned nothing from the billions of dollars wasted from fraud in the credit card system. Payments should always start after an explicit order by the payer to their bank, not just having the payee say "trust me, they totally want me to have this money".
SEPA is a bi-directional protocol – if you try to take money from a bank account, the bank can say "nope", and the transaction can fail (with the person trying to pull the money taking the loss).
As banks allow you to configure this – mine allows me to disallow all direct debit, or disallow foreign direct debit, or only allow it from specific companies – this is not an issue.
