Cookies are and have been everywhere on the web for almost as long as the internet has been publicly available. The reason you're seeing popups telling you about it now is because of the
GDPR from the EU which is supposed to protect internet end users from corporate tracking and privacy invasion. You mostly aren't going to hear about that in the states because god forbid we give a shit about privacy here. How would the government tap into those sweet, sweet datastreams from all the hundreds of sites tracking your every electronic move if we gave a shit about privacy?
And make no mistake, whether you've accepted cookies or not, you're being tracked. Facebook keeps ghost profiles for anyone not logged into them if any of your contacts have uploaded their info on you and they ARE tracking you. Advertisers track the SHIT out of internet users. Basically, if you are on the web, you're being watched. Now, for a lot of people they don't care, but I find still more people are completely unaware.
Granted, it's not like meatspace is much different these days. All those ring cameras can be tapped by police at will. The US government is trying its damndest to get direct feeds from every device, and already has access to most. GPS tracks us anywhere we take our phones. We're being datamined for everything we're worth every second we're awake, and for those wearing health-tracking smart watches, even while we sleep. And nobody in America seems to give a shit.
