As privacy concerns continue to dominate discussions around internet usage and regulations such as GDPR become ever more prevalent, ISP’s and search engines are looking at smarter and more effective ways to control the flow of customer data to and from websites.
Google and Microsoft have both begun their attempt to reduce (and end) the use of third-party cookies on Chrome and Edge, respectively. Whilst this will take time, and Google will undoubtedly delay their deprecation if issues are found, it is important to stay up to date with the changes.
What are First and Third-party Cookies?
Standard or first-party cookies are, at their most basic, small data files that websites send to your browser to track and monitor your internet browsing activity. Whilst that seems intrusive, they play an incredibly important part in the browsing process and are essential for session management, user authentication, and remembering user preferences from previous visits. For example, shopping sites use them to remember what’s in your cart, protected sites recognize your passwords, and sports sites might use them to remember what teams you follow. Even if sometimes you’d like to forget!
Third-party cookies are more powerful. Just like standard cookies, these are data files that are stored on a user’s browser by a website, but in this case originate from a different domain or website than the one that the user is visiting. From a marketing perspective, they are of course incredibly useful. They track and store user behavior across multiple sites, enabling personalized ads, single sign-on password verification over related sites, and can provide marketers (and other less well-intentioned actors) highly detailed analytics on individual consumers.
So, What’s The Problem?
Quite simply, unfettered tracking of, and access to, consumers internet usage, and more importantly (and worryingly) personal information such as gender, sexuality, religion, political affiliation, etc.
Third-party cookies allow almost unlimited cross-site tracking and analytics. For example, if site A uses a resource from site B (like an image), site B can set a trackable cookie on site A. If site C also shares the same image from site B, they can share the browser information from site A – even if they are completely unrelated websites!
With so many websites carrying adverts, social media widgets, referral marketing links, etc., the potential for users’ private and personal information to be incorrectly harvested, stored, bought, sold, and of course hacked, has become a significant issue.
What’s Happening?
It’s increasingly clear that from ethical, privacy and regulatory perspectives, third-party cookies cannot continue in their current form.
In January this year, Google Chrome restricted third-party cookies for one percent of Chrome Stable clients. Here’s what they had to say:
“To facilitate testing, Chrome has restricted third-party cookies by default for 1% of Chrome Stable clients and 20% of Canary, Dev, and Beta clients. During this testing period, it is important for sites and services to start preparing for third-party cookie restrictions, including moving to more private alternatives. Subject to addressing any remaining competition concerns of the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority, we envision proceeding with third-party cookie deprecation starting in early 2025.”
You can read the full blog post here.
Microsoft has also committed to deprecating third-party cookies:
“Microsoft Edge will start experimenting with deprecating third-party cookies in the coming months, targeting less than 1% of non-managed device users, and continue throughout 2024. This will enable us to measure and evaluate the various impacts to customers and partners and encourage the ecosystem to proactively prepare for the eventual removal.”
You can read the full blog post here.
Does Click Have a Plan?
We absolutely do! And it’s a good one.
Click is introducing a new authentication method called “Cookies Having Independent Partitioned State” or simply CHIPS, in our Marketing Automation and Click CRM products.
This is the method that is recommended by Google and allows developers to opt a cookie into a partitioned storage state – essentially a separate “cookie jar” per top level site. This will dramatically improve user privacy and security without compromising essential functionality such as session management and password recognition.
In simple terms, if Click sets a cookie on your website, only we will be able to see the data collected. It won’t be shared or be accessible to any third-party websites or entities.
Conclusion
As we move through 2024 and the testing phases begin to demonstrate results, we can expect to see Google and Microsoft ramping up their deprecation of third-party cookies. As with any software or technology widely used by so many people, there may well be unforeseen complications, adjustments and improvements that need to be made. But have no doubt, the end of third-party cookies is nigh!
Click’s developers will be staying fully engaged with the deprecation process as it moves forward, and as we’re natively integrated with Dynamics, you can expect us to be ahead of the game!
In our next article, we’ll explore how the new privacy protocols might affect marketing departments and examine strategies and options that are being recommended by industry experts. Stay tuned!
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