Cookieless World

Despite their seemingly innocent name, cookies have found themselves at the heart of one of the internet’s biggest privacy revolutions. Specifically, third-party cookies have come under fire from privacy-advocacy groups, ultimately leading Google to work towards a cookieless future. This change will have significant implications for advertisers, as third-party cookies have been an essential targeting technology since their inception.

Let’s dive into the implications of Google’s decision and how you can prepare for the cookieless future.

In this Media Review, you can read about Google’s Privacy Sandbox for Desktop and Android advancements, Meta’s swap from GDPR’s Legitimate Interest to Consent clause, and European Commission’s concerns over Google disrupting competition across MarTech.

Cookies play an essential role in the modern internet. These small pieces of data stored in your web browser can do everything from saving login details to enhancing website performance to helping marketers show users products that they will love. However, not all cookies are made equal, and there are significant differences between first-party and third-party cookies.

The Privacy Sandbox timeline states that in Q3 2024, “Chrome will phase out support for third-party cookies over a two-month period.” Whether or not Q3 2024 is the right time is an important question, but in this blog post, we’d like to focus on the second aspect of the deprecation—the duration of the time over which it reaches 100% of users. We will argue that a two-month timeframe (a “cliff”) is too quick and therefore, dangerous. To maximize the chances of AdTech successfully transitioning to a cookieless world, the deprecation ramp-up should be more prolonged, gradual, and known in advance.

This article aims to complete the round of quality tests performed on the sampled Seller-Defined Audiences signals we received from the sell side. While the previous article investigated contextual SDAs, this one will focus on user SDAs and verify how they reflect reality. The tests in this section varied from the ones performed on the contextual signals as the nature of the user type differs. The first test relied on a manual check of an assignment mechanism, while the second one was based on a survey campaign.

In this Media Review you can read about Google’s Privacy Sandbox advancements, Meta’s unprecedented GDPR fine, and Apple’s new preventive measures to third-party tracking.