I admit I don't have any firm data in front of me on this, but I think generally we have Europe, et. al, to thank for the absolutely copious amounts of totally meaningless "this site uses cookies" (which everyone has known since 20 years ago) message. I remember when it first became trendy in the U.S., it was funny because it totally wasn't required here, but rumor had it that Europeans were doing it, and so soon you saw the notices start popping up even in the most ridiculous (far-removed from that law) places....like my child's 8th grade school's website. And surely politicians here in the U.S. jumped on the bandwagon quickly enough. What annoys me is that a lot of the Privacy Laws tend to be putting in place a whole bunch of policies that nobody except the politician [maybe], who wrote the bill....And the business, who has to comply, understands. I have never met or even personally heard of anyone who has taken advantage of pretty much any "consumer rights/access" stuff in those laws. (Who knows, perhaps on some very bored day in the future, when I suddenly wish to know precisely how Amazon or Walmart.com use cookies to track me, or want to know how they tie ads to my presence on a webpage, suddenly I'll be thrilled that there's a 2000-page legislation that saved us all from ...... [not knowing] (?)
You can tell I am also skeptical of the rewards vs. benefits. I totally agree that privacy laws are probably a great example of regulation gone - not sure if I would say Too Far, or just poorly and meaninglessly implemented, at great burden to all (except the consumer, who I am skeptical has any way of measuring benefit, or how much they even benefit) ...After all, a privacy policy isn't a privacy protection, it's just a written explanation of non-protection, and who actually reads a business's privacy policy and then says "Oh, glad I found this out - guess I won't do business here". Never heard of that either.
What would be really nice is if the creators/sellers of all of this boilerplate software (wordpress, even AWF's backend), were required to provide documents about how their technology interacts with any component covered by these pieces of legislation. It would be an automatic part and parcel of being the creator of the technology. That would be too logical!