What really amazes me is how a random high-profile website has like 400+ "partners" listed in the cookie dialogs. Each one is building a profile of people in various ways based on the site usage, and internet usage in general.

Where does all that information go? What is the information used for in the end?

The tracking technologies enable many things, and the continuum from "to show you interest-based ads" to full-on Stasi is rather large.

But given the massive scale of tracking and profile-building, at least I have no idea exactly where we are now (though clearly we're not at the worst-case extreme).

Remember when local US companies with zero EU presence were geo-blocking EU visitors in-case they were found to be in-violation of the GDPR? Presumably the fear was a crack team of EU secret service agents would kidnap and illegally extradite them to stand trial in Brussels.

Oh dear you're going to trigger the pro EU crowd who don't like being told EU law doesn't apply in the US

They'll send in Jean Claude van Damme

> They'll send in Jean Claude Juncker

FTFY

You mean remember the thing that is still very much a thing?

I also occasionally get geo-blocked by Japanese websites too.

> in-case they were found to be in-violation of the GDPR

Oh, they definitely are.

Those geo-blocks still exist, not only for small mom-n-pop businesses.