A Cookie-less Future for the Web
If you have browsed the internet at all in your lifetime, you should most likely been faced with a pop up saying something along the lines of: we use cookies to improve your browsing experience.
3rd-party web cookies are is how websites are able to know where we’ve come from on the internet, in terms of what website we visited before reaching the current one. You can think of them as a digital trail as far as what websites you’ve visited. It allows marketers to have access to information which helps them to show the correct advertisements to their customers.
Earlier in the 21st century, you would usually have the option of having cookies enabled while you are browsing a website, but in recent years, most website will have give you the options to disable extra cookies, and leave only the necessary cookies needed for the website to provide a decent user experience.
So now, in 2021, where is has been announced that Google, will stop supporting 3rd-party cookies in their Google Chrome browser, what does that mean for the future of cookies? Will other browser follow suit? What will be the replacement for cookies? Let us take a look to answer some of these questions below.
Other Browsers
Surprisingly, other companies had already begun to move away from using 3rd-party cookies (Mozilla, Apple), and started blocking the functionality in their browser applications (FireFox, Safari). Google had announced in 2020 that they would be moving away from using cookies for their browser, Google Chrome, by 2023, but wanted to work with their partners while doing this change in order to ensure that their partners’ online business marketing would not be affected. Other company took a stricter approach to phasing out cookies, by blocking their use completely on their browsers.
Disabling cookies in such a demanding manner could not only affect the browsing experience of the customer and the online marketing of the businesses who rely on using cookies, but would also be grounds for not-so-good workarounds to be put in place, which could be even more invasive than third-party cookies in the first place.
Privacy
A lot of the concerns and issues surrounding cookies are related to the privacy of those browsing the web. Cookies essentially leave advertisers information on which sites you have visited previously. This gives them the ability to show ads that are relevant to your browsing experience as you go from website to website. Although this is useful in some scenarios, such as being advertised products and services that you would more than likely be interested in, others view this tracking of user data in order to market products more accurately as an invasion of privacy. This is why even ad-blocker services are so popular (that, and no one likes to sit through online advertisements if they do not have to).
Replacements
3rd-party cookies are not the only solution for knowing the history of websites the user has visited. There are existing alternative to using third-party cookies out there:
Universal ID
Idea here is every website visitor has a unique ID assigned to them, based on their email. This ID is anonymized by having the email encrypted, with no identifying characters related to the email.
FLoC
FLoC, which stands for Federated Learning of Cohorts, is an alternative to 3rd-party cookies used by advertisers developed by Google. It attempts to group users into similar groups, based on their browsing interests. These groups can then be used by advertisers to show their ads accordingly. There is an article about FLoC which describes how this standard is expected to work here.
Contextual Advertising
Ads are shown to users, based on the context of the web page they are currently only. The user’s behavioural profile in regards to their interest as they browser the web are not taken into account in this type of advertising.
First-Party Cookies
These are cookies which are used by those who own the site being visited. The information captured in 1st-party cookies are usually necessary for the owner of the website to get decent information on the user’s browsing experience.
Conclusion
The deprecation of 3rd-party cookie support from most, if not all modern browsers has definitely caused some ruckus among advertisement services on the web. With the increasing need and want of privacy for users while browsing the internet into the future, this is definitely a better choice for the web development world and users of the internet. But this should also be handled with a certain care, so as that whatever solutions are put in place in for the future, address the short-comings, or issues found with 3rd-party cookies.
