system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: Why has there been a sudden influx of sites warning about the use of cookies?

I thought that a decent amount of websites used cookies by default. Now all of a sudden there are dialog boxes popping up on what it seems like every website stating it uses cookies. Did a huge lawsuit create this? Or maybe it was always like this and I just never realized.
gpt
There's been an EU directive requiring those warnings since 2011. It may be that you've been visiting a lot more European sites lately. You're right, almost every website (especially every website with some sort of log in system) uses cookies.