The uncertain future of the third-party cookie
The digital marketer’s toolkit has included cookies as a critical component for years. These snippets of code that uniquely identify a user’s browser enable targeted advertising to follow consumers across websites, as well as a vast ecosystem of MarTech providers that collect consumer behavior data and make it available to marketers.
Today, there are thousands of data platform providers – including customer data platforms, data management platforms and data exchange platforms – for data-driven marketing strategy and campaigns.
But cookies are increasingly under fire from consumers who want to protect their data and demand privacy. Browsers like Firefox and Safari have blocked third-party cookies since 2013. And in 2019, Safari started disabling all cookies after seven days, effectively eliminating the ability to use even first-party cookies to track Safari users over time.
Similarly, despite backing away from their previous announcements that they were dropping third-party cookies from Chrome, Google is still planning on providing alternatives so users may make informed choices about their browsing privacy. Regardless of when this happens, Google’s plans are significant because it dominates the browser market space with Android and Chrome.
Racing to replace cookies
Given the acceleration of digital commerce, understanding digital behavior is more important than ever. However, the balancing act between gaining this understanding and respecting privacy is becoming more difficult to maintain. Scrutiny on privacy has snowballed since the GDPR passed the European Parliament in 2016. Today, there are 138 countries worldwide with consumer and data privacy laws in force.
