The Real-Life Cookie Monsters
It is safe to assume that we have had creepy encounters on the internet like you are being stalked. From going to a certain website to search for some smartwatch, you decide to log into social media to spend the time. And there it is — you see ads about Huawei GT 2e, Xiaomi Mi Colors, and Apple Watch. Coincidence? — Definitely not. The culprit behind this happenstance is the third-party cookie in the site a person had visited. Third-party cookies are what advertising companies use to shadow or track users, keeping a record of one’s site visits and internet activity. This is how they are able to send and make a person see personalized ads.
Long before, Safari and Mozilla have done their part of assuring privacy by lessening and blocking the said cookie. And now, Google Chrome is looking to eliminate theirs in 2022. Although it will definitely affect the advertiser’s efficacy, Google is the least one to suffer. Before putting this to action, Google launched “Privacy Sandbox”, where personalized ads are still present, but preserving user’s privacy is promised. They also have FLoC, or Federated Learning of Cohorts, whose goal is to establish cohorts or onlookers based on similar habits and activities done on the web by various users. Advertisers can target the users per cohorts, instead of individually. So instead of personal data from all over other sites, they keep track of habitual web activity alone.
Undeniably, this will affect advertisers and the array of markets that they can reach. However, a third-party cookie is not their downfall. First-party cookies will still be useful, as this is a generated code automatically stored on the user’s device whenever they visit a certain site. With this, website companies can see the activity of the user within that site — alone. Generated advertisements can be determined based on that activity. But the rest of the user’s movement outside that specific site is untraceable.
To be able to cope up with this change, advertisers must be more adept in relying on the first-party cookie and limited activity on a certain site. This is also a call for them to be more resourceful and innovative in reaching out to users without having to disrupt privacy. As Google’s FLoC is and will still be undergoing a test run, the advertisers can monitor the updates and see how it can be relevant to them, how they can use it to their advantage.
