Google‘s plan to deprecate third-party cookies by Q3 2024 will be delayed by almost two years, so publishers, advertisers, and web developers have time to test and build feasible alternatives
What is a 3rd party cookie?
Internet cookies are small text files placed on your device by someone OTHER THAN the website in which you are visiting. Cookies store data about you and the cookie owners can use this to show you ads in the future.
What are the alternatives?
It is important to note that this is not the end of cookies, there are lots of useful applications of cookies that will remain in browsers, e.g first-party cookies that stay nestled under the domain that you are utilizing at the time. These are how Amazon saves your shopping cart and Netflix remembers your password. In fact, third-party cookies have been blocked in Safari, Mozilla, and others for a while so this is not the end of days.
The initial response to the announcement of the deprecation was the spawning of various new ID solutions independent of cookie matching E.g:
(Please note there are many more)
These rely on various other methods to group users. e.g fingerprinting (uses the probability of a certain cluster of attributes like device, IP, OS, browser to build an individual device identification) or email hashing ( encrypting your login email to use as a secure identifier)
Google Solution:
Recently Google has introduced its new approach to delivering and measuring ads sent to Chrome users once it finally cuts cookies. Any update brought by Google will have a massive impact on the industry because of the popularity of its products - Google Chrome for example reportedly accounts for around 65.3% of web browsing activity.
FLOC (The Federated Learning of Cohorts) - is a privacy-focused solution intent on delivering relevant ads “by clustering large groups of people with similar interests”. Accounts are anonymised, grouped into interests, and more importantly, user information is processed on-device rather than broadcast across the web. Meaning, instead of your individual browser activity being tracked by everyone with the third party cookie, you’re now assigned labels that combine you together with other people (or, cohorts) who behave the same way you do online.
Venatus Plan:
Venatus started laying plans to build above mentioned into our tech and still is to remain relatively tech agnostic. I.e if one of these picks up lots of traction we will use it, and may cut ones that dont etc.