Positive and Negative Aspects of the End of Tracking Cookies

Carina Ma
Marketing in the Age of Digital
2 min readNov 13, 2022

Google plans to stop tracking cookies to improve user privacy. Although collecting third-party cookies enhances website usability and steers digital advertising, it allows cybercriminals to monitor users and obtain their private information. Hence, scraping third-party cookies will limit advertisers’ ability to track users and customize their content. While cookie-cutting will negatively affect businesses and website usability, it will foster data privacy and spark digital transformation.

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Positive Aspects of the End of Tracking Cookies

Deprecating cookies will positively affect advertisers and users by preserving data privacy and transforming digital marketing. Replacing tracking cookies will reduce data exposure to cybersecurity threats. Without cookies, browsing history will be safe from websites that gather private data using tracking pixels and other digital tools. Therefore, discontinuing cookies will improve online privacy by reducing data vulnerabilities. Google’s move will make marketers deploy privacy-conscious initiatives to target clients and predict events depending on their actions. For instance, companies will shift to anonymous tracking tools to safeguard consumer privacy while fetching actionable data for marketing purposes. Hence, websites will utilize their intelligence capabilities to collect data in a way that benefits marketers and protects users.

Negative Aspects of the End of Tracking Cookies

The end of third-party cookies would compromise the internet experience and complicate marketing activities. Browsers save cookies that enable websites to enhance their usability and streamline user-web interactions. However, cookie-cutting will weaken websites’ ability to remember users, thereby creating negative browsing experiences. Without cookies, marketers will not collect browsing data to conduct affiliate marketing and retarget customers using ads. Failure to track user activity will reduce advertisers’ targeting capabilities by restricting web access to IP addresses and HTTP cookies. Such marketers will be prone to financial risks for failing to identify and retarget their customers.

Conclusion

Replacing third-party cookies will enhance data security and change digital marketing despite some shortcomings. It will protect consumers from privacy-sensitive tools and make marketers develop new digital marketing initiatives. However, ending tracking cookies will damage user experience and complicate customer retargeting as well as affiliate marketing. Marketers should improve their digital advertising capabilities to embrace cookie-less marketing.

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