Navigating the Digital World without Third-Party Cookies

The digital marketer’s toolkit has included cookies as a critical component for years. These snippets of code that uniquely identify a user’s browser enable targeted advertising to follow consumers across websites, as well as a vast ecosystem of MarTech providers that collect consumer behavior data and make it available to marketers.

Today, there are thousands of data platform providers – including customer data platforms, data management platforms and data exchange platforms – for data-driven marketing strategy and campaigns. But cookies are increasingly under fire from consumers who want to protect their data and demand privacy. Browsers like Firefox and Safari have blocked third-party cookies since 2013. And in 2019, Safari started disabling all cookies after seven days, effectively eliminating the ability to use even first-party cookies to track Safari users over time. Similarly, despite numerous delays since Google initially announced that it was dropping third-party cookies from Chrome, this is still a target initiative for them. Regardless of its completion date, Google’s deprecation is significant because it dominates the browser market space with Android and Chrome.