Europeans have valued privacy and data protection for quite a while now culturally. The ePrivacy Directive is from 2002 (derisively referred to as the "cookie l

Europeans have valued privacy and data protection for quite a while now culturally. The ePrivacy Directive is from 2002 (derisively referred to as the "cookie law"). And GDPR had a multi-year grace period. It's simply a result of companies ignoring building these kind of functionality for far too long.