Yet it looks like usatoday.com article pages continuously leak this same information, and more, to at least a dozen commercial third parties.
Is the difference that the government was trying to get the information for free?
No, but they can give that data to the FBI who do raid houses.
Hilariously, the USA Today homepage also hits OneTrust, who has the slogan "Privacy, Security and Data Governance" right in the <title>. What is there to govern if nearly all the major tech players have your access logs?
USA Today is shouting its readers' reading behavior from the mountain top.
A user visits an e-commerce website and decides to purchase a product. They add it to their shopping basket before continuing browsing for more goods they wish to buy. They then finish their shopping by going through the website’s checkout process.
The website uses cookies to ensure that when the user chooses the goods they wish to buy and clicks the ‘add to basket’ or ‘proceed to checkout’ button, the site ‘remembers’ what they chose on a previous page.
In this context, the cookie is ‘strictly necessary’ to provide the service the user requests and so the exemption would apply and no consent would be required
I read pedos or terrorists combined with a different than usual request for information as a red flag for "fishing for a precedent".