The Cookie Compliance Question
Third-party cookies were meant to be replaced in 2024. That deadline is now in doubt, but marketers still have new tracking questions to answer.
For years, advertisers and technology firms have worried about the impending replacement of third-party cookies. No other technology can truly replace the ability of cookies to track people across websites, yet pressure from privacy advocates and security researchers have forced browsers to deprecate them. It's not just external consultants driving the change. In an effort to sell their platforms to increasingly privacy-conscious users, Safari and Firefox blocked third-party cookies years ago. Third-party cookies are already ancient history on iOS devices.
As a result, most use cases for third-party cookies have already found alternatives. Web analytics and marketing automation platforms switched to secure first-party cookie solutions years ago, but these platforms only need to track users across one site. Websites using third-party cookies for login also switched to more modern alternatives - although Microsoft 365 is a notable exception. Ad tech vendors still need tracking across multiple sites, a capability explicitly blocked by more modern first-party cookie solutions.