Google announced earlier this year that it will phase out the use of third-party tracking cookies in its Chrome browser by 2022, inshort - kill any tracking codes that don't belong to itself. Cookies are those little strings of text codes that get dropped to your computer every time you visit any webpage. These are legitimate codes that lets publishers or advertisers capture behavioural information about the user and thus helps them to tailor the messages accordingly. There is no PII data shared and targeting is based only on the IP address of the device.
Cookies can be of many types. Session Cookies, which are active only for the duration you are on the website, Persistent cookies, which have a longer life and have an expiry date, First party cookies and Third party cookies. First-party cookies are cookies left on your browser by the websites you’ve visited. Think of any news site you just visited to read news and then you leave the site. The new site drops a cookie into your browser and remembers the activities you performed, such as your login details, language preferences or a video you watched but left in between. The next time you visit the site again, you don't have to change your settings manually every time you log into the site. Third-party cookies are files stored on your browser from advertisers and other parties that have information-sharing agreements with the site you visited. So suppose while you were on the news site and you clicked on a display ad. The ad tech platform that created this code or may capture this information by dropping another set of code without you knowing about it very explicitly. This is a third party cookie, because it does not belong to the news site, but some other company that wants to track your activity for retargeting purposes. While this doesn't sound all that bad because by sharing this information, it only provides a more personalised experience to the user by showing future ads which are relevant and make your surfing experience more customizable and faster, without proper governance of such type to data it may be vulnerable to misuse.
Every modern web browser uses some sort of cookies and it is an essential part of the design and a tracking cookie takes the regular cookie process one step further and sends a log of your online activities, usually tied to your Internet Protocol (IP) address, to a remote database for analysis. Hence there is no one answer to whether cookies are good or bad.
Read about Lotame’s cookie collection and privacy policy here. This will give a fair idea of what sort of information is collected and how it is shared across networks.
How many times have you seen this pop-up on any website you’ve visited?
The fundamental to any marketing campaign is accurate targeting and hence consumer data becomes crucial. As people get connected more and more across devices and platforms, track-ability becomes easier. Although cookies do not carry any PII (personal identifiable information) data, there is no control on who is collecting the data and how it is being used. The ad industry has been struggling with privacy concerns and the obscure ways of placing pixels makes the issues even more pronounced. To counter this some websites have now started getting explicit approval from its site user regarding their cookie policy. Europe implemented GDPR in 2018 and California data protection law came into force last year. It is just a matter of time similar privacy rules will be implemented in APAC too.
Safari (2017) and Firefox (2019) eliminated 3P tracking cookies from their browsers long back before Google Chrome announced this year. More than 60% of the global internet browsing happens on Chrome and rest on Safari, Mozilla, Edge and other browsers. 3rd party cookies are used primarily for retargeting purposes. So companies that thrive on 3rd party data will face the brunt first.This includes all 3rdP data providers such as BlueKai, Datalogix, LiveRamp, Criteo and many others.
Here is a snapshot of vendors which have a data sharing agreement with the news site I just visited.
As privacy & data violations start seeming as a threat, advertisers will have to find new ways to engage consumers. Adtech vendors will find alternative ways to collect cookie-less information. Publishers will try to get more logged in users to build their database. While we know little about Google’s Privacy SandBox and how publishers and advertisers can leverage it to gather audience information yet, in order to be prepared to embrace this change, advertisers will need to be focussed on their own customers first. That means relying on their opted-in 1st party database, contextual advertising & search advertising for new audience acquisition and making meaningful conversation to retain them. Whichever strategies publishers, adtech vendors and advertisers will adopt, it has to be customer centric. And that means providing them more privacy and control of their own data and help create a conducive web surfing environment which is acceptable to the online population.
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